
Class JPS_?J^Ji 
Book . \ 



CoipglitN" _b 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 




ESSAYS ON WORK AND CULTURE 



BOOKS BY MR. 


MABIE. ' 


MY STUDY FIRE. 


MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series. . | 


UNDER THE TREES 


AND ELSE- ' 


WHERE. 




SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. | 


ESSAYS IN LITERARY 


INTERPRE- 


TATION. 




ESSAYS ON NATURE AND CULTURE. 


BOOKS AND CULTURE. 




ESSAYS ON WORK AND 


CULTURE. 



ESSAYS ON WORK AND 

CULTUREe^BY HAMILTON 
WRIGHT M ABIE 




NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
MDCCCXCVIII 






17199 



Copyright, 1898, 
By the Outlook Co. 



Copyright, 1898, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 




TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 

£.Jd Cf5PY, 
. . 1Gr3. 



HENRY VAN DYKE 

"Along the slender wires of speech 

Some message from the heart is sent; 
But who can tell the whole that 's meant ? 
Our dearest thoughts are out of reach.'* 



i 





Contents 






9 




Chapter 




Page 


I. 


Tool or Man? .... 


7 


II. 


The Man in the Work 


17 


III. 


Work as Self-Expression . 


27 


IV. 


The Pain of Youth . . 


35 


V. 


The Year of Wandering . 


44 


VI. 


The Ultimate Test . . 


53 


VII. 


Liberation 


62 


VIII. 


The Larger Education 


70 


IX. 


Fellowship 


79 


X. 


Work and Pessimism . . 


. 88 


XI. 


The Educational Attitude 


98 


XII. 


Special Training . . . . 


108 


XIII. 


General Training . . . 


. 117 


XIV. 


The Ultimate Aim . 


. 127 


XV. 


Securing Right Conditions 


137 


XVI. 


Concentration .... 


149 


XVII. 


Relaxation 


159 


xvm. 


Recreation 


. 170 



Contents 

Chapter Page 

XIX. Ease of Mood 1 80 

XX. Sharing the Race-Fortune . 188 

XXI. The Imagination in Work . 198 

XXII. The Play of the Imagination 208 

XXIII. Character 219 

XXIV. Freedom from Self-Conscious- 

ness 231 

XXV. Consummation 241 



VI 



Work and Culture 

?- 

Chapter I 
Tool or Man? 

A COMPLETE man Is so un- 
common that when he appears 
he is looked upon with suspicion, as 
if there must be something wrong 
about him. If a man is content to 
deal vigorously with affairs, and leave 
art, religion, and science to the en- 
joyment or refreshment or enlighten- 
ment of others, he is accepted as 
strong, sound, and wise ; but let him 
add to practical sagacity a love of 
poetry and some skill in the practice 
of it ; let him be not only honest 
and trustworthy, but genuinely reli- 
7 



Work and Culture 

gious ; let him be not only keenly- 
observant and exact in his estimate of 
trade influences and movements, but 
devoted to the study of some science, 
and there goes abroad the impression 
that he is superficial. It is written, 
apparently, in the modern, and es- 
pecially in the American, conscious- 
ness, that a man can do but one 
thing well ; if he attempts more than 
one thing, he betrays the weakness 
of versatility. If this view of life is 
sound, man is born to imperfect de- 
velopment and must not struggle 
with fate. He may have natural 
aptitudes of many kinds; he may 
have a passionate desire to try three 
or four different instruments ; he 
may have a force of vitality which is 
equal to the demands of several vo- 
cations or avocations ; but he must 
disregard the most powerful impulses 
8 



Tool or Man? 

of his nature; he must select one 
tool, and with that tool he must do 
all the work appointed to him. 

If he is a man of business, he must 
turn a deaf ear to the voices of art ; 
if he writes prose, he must not per- 
mit himself the delight of writing 
verse ; if he uses the pen, he must 
not use the voice. If he ventures to 
employ two languages for his thought, 
to pour his energy into two channels, 
the awful judgment of superficiality 
falls on him like a decree of fate. 

So fixed has become the habit of 
confusing the use of manifold gifts 
with mere dexterity that men of 
quality and power often question the 
promptings which impel them to use 
different or diverse forms of expres- 
sion ; as if a man were born to use 
only one limb and enjoy only one 
resource in this many-sided universe ! 
9 



Work and Culture 

Specialisation has been carried so 
far that it has become an organised 
tyranny through the curiously per- 
verted view of life which it has de- 
veloped in some minds. A man is 
permitted, in these days, to cultivate 
one faculty or master one field of 
knowledge, but he must not try to 
live a whole life, or work his nature 
out on all sides, under penalty of 
public suspicion and disapproval. 
If a Pericles were to appear among 
us, he would be discredited by the 
very qualities which made him the 
foremost public man of his time 
among the most intelligent and gifted 
people who have yet striven to solve 
the problems of Hfe. If Michel- 
angelo came among us, he would be 
compelled to repress his tremendous 
energy or face the suspicion of the 
critical mind of the age; it is not 

lO 



Tool or Man ? 

permitted a man, in these days, to 
excel in painting, sculpture, archi- 
tecture, and sonnet-writing. If, in 
addition, such a man were to exhibit 
moral qualities of a very unusual 
order, he would deepen the suspicion 
that he was not playing the game of 
life fairly; for there are those who 
have so completely broken life into 
fragments that they not only deny 
the possibility of the possession of the 
ability to do more than one thing 
well, but the existence of any kind 
of connection between character and 
achievement. 

Man is not only a fragment, but 
the world is a mass of unrelated 
parts ; religion, science, morals, and 
art moving in little spheres of 
their own, without the possibiHty of 
contact. The arts were born at the 
foot of the altar, as we are some- 



Work and Culture 

times reminded ; but let the artist 
beware how he entertains religious 
ideas or emotions to-day ; to suggest 
that art and morals have any interior 
relation is, in certain circles, to 
awaken pity that one*s knowledge of 
these things is still so rudimentary. 
The scholar must beware of the 
graces of style; if, like the late 
Master of Balliol, he makes a trans- 
lation so touched with distinction 
and beauty that it is likely to become 
a classic in the language in which it 
is newly lodged, there are those who 
look askance at his scholarship; for 
knowledge, to be pure and genuine, 
must be rude, slovenly, and barbar- 
ous in expression. The religious 
teacher may master the principles of 
his faith, but let him beware how he 
applies them to the industrial or 
social conditions of society. If he 

12 



Tool or Man? 

ventures to make this dangerous ex- 
periment, he is promptly warned that 
he is encroaching on the territory of 
the economist and sociologist. The 
artist must not permit himself to care 
for truth, because it has come to be 
understood in some quarters that he 
is concerned with beauty, and with 
beauty alone. To assume that there 
is any unity in life, any connection 
between character and achievement, 
any laws of growth which operate in 
all departments and in all men, is to 
discredit one's intelligence and jeop- 
ardise one's influence. One field 
and one tool to each man seems to 
be the maxim of this divisive philos- 
ophy — if that can be called a phil- 
osophy which .discards unity as a 
worn-out metaphysical conception, 
and separates not only men but 
the arts, occupations, and skills 
13 



Work and Culture 

from each other by impassable 
gulfs. 

Versatility is often a treacherous 
ease, which leads the man who 
possesses it into fields where he has 
no sure footing because he has no 
first-hand knowledge, and therefore 
no real power; and against this ten- 
dency, so prevalent in this country, 
the need of concentration must con- 
tinually be urged. The great majority 
of men lack the abounding vitahty 
which must find a variety of channels 
to give it free movement. But the 
danger which besets some men ought 
not to be made a limitation for men 
of superior strength ; it ought not to 
be used as a barrier to keep back 
those whose inward impulse drives 
them forward, not in one but in 
many directions. Above all, the 
limitations of a class ought not to be 
14 



Tool or Man ? 

made the basis of a conception of life 
which divides its activities by hard and 
fast lines, and tends, by that process 
of hardening which shows itself in 
every field of thought or work, to 
make men tools and machines in- 
stead of free, creative forces in 
society. 

A man of original power can never 
be confined within the limits of a 
single field of interest and activity, 
nor can he ever be content to bear 
the marks and use the skill of a 
single occupation. He cannot pour 
his whole force into one channel; 
there is always a reserve of power be- 
yond the demands of the work which 
he has in hand at the moment. 
Wherever he may find his place and 
whatever work may come to his hand, 
he must always be aware of the larger 
movement of life which Incloses his 
15 



Work and Culture 

special task; and he must have the 
consciousness of direct relation with 
that central power of which all activi- 
ties are inadequate manifestations. 
To a man of this temper the whole 
range of human interests must remain 
open, and such a man can never 
escape the conviction that life is a 
unity under all its complexities ; that 
all activities stand vitally related to 
each other ; that truth, beauty, knowl- 
edge, and character must be harmon- 
ised and blended in every real and 
adequate development of the human 
spirit. To the growth of every 
flower earth, sun, and atmosphere 
must contribute ; in the making of a 
man all the rich forces of nature and 
civilisation must have place. 



i6 



chapter II 

The Man in the Work 

THE general mind possesses a 
kind of divination which dis- 
covers itself in those comments, criti- 
cisms, and judgments which pass from 
man to man through a wide area and 
sometimes through long periods of 
time. The opinion which appears at 
first glance to be an expression of ma- 
terialism often shows, upon closer 
study, an element of idealism or a 
touch of spiritual discernment. It is 
customary, for instance, to say of a 
man that he lives in his works ; as if 
the enduring quality of his fame rested 
in and was dependent upon the tan- 
gible products of his genius or his 
skill. There is truth in the phrase 

2 ly 



Work and Culture 

even when its scope is limited to this 
obvious meaning; but there is a 
deeper truth behind the truism, — the 
truth that a man lives in his works, 
not only because they commemorate 
but because they express him. They 
are products of his skill ; but they 
are also the products of his soul. 
The man is revealed in them, and 
abides in them, not as a statue in a 
temple, but as a seed in the grain and 
the fruit. They have grown out of 
him, and they uncover the secrets of 
his spiritual life. No man can con- 
ceal himself from his fellows ; every- 
thing he fashions or creates interprets 
and explains him. 

This deepest significance of work 
has always been divined even when it 
has not been clearly perceived. Men 
have understood that there is a spirit- 
ual quality even in the most material 
i8 



The Man in the Work 

products of a man's activity, and, 
even in ruder times, they have dis- 
cerned the inner relation of the things 
which a man makes with the man 
himself. In our time, when the im- 
mense significance of this essential 
harmony between spirit and product 
has been accepted as a guiding prin- 
ple in historic investigation, the stray 
spear-head and broken potsherd are 
prized by the anthropologist, because 
a past race lives in them. The lowest 
and commonest kind of domestic 
vessels and implements disclose to 
the student of to-day not only the 
stage of manual skill which their 
makers had reached, but also the 
general ideas of life which those mak- 
ers held. When it comes to the 
higher products, character, tempera- 
ment, and genius are discerned in every 
mutilated fragment. The line on an 
19 



Work and Culture 

urn reveals the spirit of the unknown 
sculptor who cut it in the endur- 
ing stone. It has often been said 
that if every memorial of the Greek 
race save the Parthenon had perished, 
it would be possible to gain a clear 
and true impression of the spir- 
itual condition and quality of that 
race. 

The great artists are the typical and 
representative men of the race, and 
whatever is true of them is true, in 
a lesser degree, of men in general. 
There is in the work of every great 
sculptor, painter, writer, composer, 
architect, a distinctive and individual 
manner so marked and unmistakable 
as to identify the man whenever and 
wherever a bit of his work appears. 
If a statue of Phidias were to be 
found without any mark of the sculp- 
tor upon it, there would be no delay 
20 



The Man in the Work 

in determining whose work it was ; 
no educated musician would be un- 
certain for a moment about a compo- 
sition of Wagner's if he heard it for 
the first time without knowledge of 
its source; nor would a short story 
from the hand of Hawthorne remain 
unclaimed a day after its publication. 
Now, this individual manner and 
quality, so evident that it is impossi- 
ble not to recognise it whenever it 
appears, is not a trick of skill ; it has 
its source in a man*s temperament 
and genius ; it is the subtlest and 
most deep-going disclosure of his na- 
ture. In so far as a spiritual quality 
can be contained and expressed in 
any form of speech known among 
men — and all the arts are forms of 
speech — that which is most secret 
and sacred in a man is freely given 
to the world in his work. 

21 



Work and Culture 

Work is sacred, therefore, not only 
because it is the fruit of self-denial, 
patience, and toil, but because it un- 
covers the soul of the worker. We 
deal with each other on so many 
planes, and have so much speech with 
each other about things of little mo- 
ment, that we often lose the sense of 
the sanctity which attaches to person- 
ality whenever it appears. There 
come moments, however, when some 
intimate experience is confided to us, 
and then, in the pause of talk, we 
become aware that we are in presence 
of a human soul behind the familiar 
face of our friend, and that we are on 
holy ground. In such moments the 
quick emotion, the sudden thrill, bear 
eloquent witness to that deeper and 
diviner life in which we all share, but 
of which we rarely seem aware. This 
perception of the presence of a man*s 

22 



The Man in the Work 

soul comes to us when we stand be- 
fore a true work of art. We not only 
uncover our heads, but our hearts are 
uncovered as well. Here is one who 
through all his skill speaks to us in 
a language which we understand, but 
which we rarely hear. A great work 
of art not only liberates the imagina- 
tion, but the heart as well; for it speaks 
to us more intimately than our friends 
are able to speak, and that reticence 
which holds us back from perfect 
intercourse when we look into each 
other's faces vanishes. A few lines 
read in the solitude of the woods, or 
before the open fire, often kindle the 
emotion and imagination which slum- 
ber within us ; in companionship with 
the greatest minds our shyness van- 
ishes ; we not only take but give with 
unconscious freedom. When we reach 
this stage we have reached the man 
23 



Work and Culture 

who lives not only by but in the work, 
and whose innermost nature speaks to 
us and confides in us through the 
form of speech which he has chosen. 

The higher the quality of the work, 
the clearer the disclosure of the spirit 
which fashioned it and gave it the 
power to search and liberate. The 
plays of Sophocles are, in many ways, 
the highest and most representative 
products of the Greek literary genius ; 
they show that genius at the moment 
when all its qualities were in harmony 
and perfectly balanced between the 
spiritual vision which it formed of 
life, and the art form to which it 
commits that precious and impalpable 
possession. One of the distinctive 
qualities of these plays is their objec- 
tivity ; their detachment from the 
moods and experiences of the drama- 
tist. This detachment is so complete 
24 



The Man in the Work 

that at first glance every trace of the 
dramatist seems to have been erased. 
But there are many passages besides 
the famous lines descriptive of the 
grove at Colonus which betray the per- 
sonality behind the plays ; and, studied 
more closely, the very detachment of 
the drama from the dramatist is signifi- 
cant of character. In the poise, har- 
mony, and balance of these beautiful 
creations there is revealed the instinct 
for proportion, the self-control and 
the subordination of the parts to the 
whole which betray a nature com- 
mitted by its very instincts to a pas- 
sionate devotion to beauty. In one 
of the poems of our own century 
which belongs in the first rank of ar- 
tistic achievements, " In Memoriam," 
the highest themes are touched with 
the strength of one who knows how 
to face the problems of life with 

25 



Work and Culture 

impartial and impersonal courage, and 
with the tenderness of one whose own 
heart has felt the immediate pressure 
of these tremendous questions. So 
every great work, whether personal or 
impersonal in intention, conveys to 
the intelligent reader an impression 
of the thought behind the skill, and 
of the character behind the thought. 
Goethe frankly declared that his works 
constituted one great confession. All 
work is confession and revelation as 
well. 



26 



chapter III 

Work as Self-Expression 

THE higher the kind and quality 
of a man s work, the more 
completely does it express his per- 
sonality. There are forms of work 
so rudimentary that the touch of 
individuality is almost entirely ab- 
sent, and there are forms of work so 
distinctive and spiritual that they are 
instantly and finally associated with 
one man. The degree in which a 
m.an individualises his work and 
gives it the quality of his own mind 
and spirit is, therefore, the measure 
of his success in giving his nature 
free and full expression. For work, 
in this large sense, is the expression 
of the man; and as the range and 
27 



Work and Culture 

significance of all kinds of expres- 
sion depend upon the scope and 
meaning of the ideas, forces, skills, 
and qualities expressed, so the dignity 
and permanence of work depend upon 
the power and insight of the worker. 
All sound work is true and genuine 
self-expression, but work has as many- 
gradations of quality and , significance 
as has character or ability. Dealing 
with essentially the same materials, 
each man in each generation has the 
opportunity of adding to the com- 
mon material that touch of originality 
in temperament, insight, or skill which 
is his only possible contribution to 
civilisation. 

The spiritual nature of work and 
its relation to character are seen in 
the diversity of work which the dif- 
ferent races have done, and in the 
unmistakable stamp which the work 
28 



Work as Self-Expression 

of each race bears. First as a matter 
of instinct, and later as a matter of 
intelligence, each race has followed, 
in its activities, the lines of least re- 
sistance, and put its energies forth in 
ways which were most attractive be- 
cause they offered the freest range and 
were nearest at hand. The attempt 
of some historians of a philosophical 
turn of mind to fit each race into a 
category and to give each race a 
sharply defined sphere of influence 
has been carried too far, and has dis- 
credited the effort to interpret arbi- 
trarily the genius of the different 
races and to assign arbitrarily their 
functions. It remains true, however, 
that, in a broad sense, each race has 
had a peculiar quality of mind and 
spirit which may be called its genius, 
and each has followed certain general 
lines and kept within certain general 
29 



Work and Culture 

limits in doing its work. The people 
who lived on the great plains of Cen- 
tral Asia worked in a different temper 
and with wide divergence of manner 
from the people who lived on the 
banks of the Nile; and the Jew, 
the Greek, and the Roman showed 
their racial differences as distinctly 
in the form and quality of their work 
as in the temper of their mind and 
character. And thus, on a great 
historical scale, the significance of 
work as an expression of character 
is unmistakably disclosed. 

In this sense work is practically 
inclusive of every force and kind of 
life ; since every real worker puts 
into it all that is most distinctive in 
his nature. The moral quality con- 
tributes sincerity, veracity, solidity of 
structure ; the intellectual quality is 
disclosed in order, lucidity, and grasp 
30 



Work as Self-Expression 

of thought; the artistic quality is 
seen in symmetry, proportion, beauty 
of construction and of detail ; the 
spiritual quality is revealed in depth 
of insight and the scope of relation- 
ships brought into view between the 
specific work and the world in which 
it is done. In work of the finer 
order, dealing with the more impres- 
sionable material, there are discover- 
able not only the character and 
quality of the worker, but the con- 
ditions under which he lives ; the 
stage of civilisation, the vigour or 
languor of vital energy, the richness 
or poverty of social life, the character 
of the soil and of the landscape, the 
pallor or the bloom of vegetation, the 
shining or the veiling of the skies. 
So genuinely and deeply does a man 
put himself into the thing he does 
that whatever affects him affects it, 
31 



Work and Culture 

and all that flows into him of spir- 
itual^ human, and natural influence 
flows into and is conserved by it. A 
bit of work of the highest quality is 
a key to a man's life because it is the 
product of that life, and it brings to 
light that which is hidden in the man 
as truly as the flower lays bare to the 
sun that which was folded in the seed. 
What a man does is, therefore, an 
authentic revelation of what he is, 
and by their works men are fairly 
and rightly judged. 

For this reason no man can live in 
any real sense who fails to give his 
personality expression through some 
form of activity. For action in some 
field is the final stage of development ; 
and to stop short of action, to rest in 
emotion or thought, is to miss the 
higher fruits of living and to evade 
one's responsibility to himself as well 
32 



Work as Self-Expression 

as to society. The man whose ar- 
tistic instinct is deep cannot be con- 
tent with those visions which rise 
out of the deeps of the imagination 
and wait for that expression which 
shall give them objective reality; the 
vision brings with it a moral necessity 
which cannot be evaded without seri- 
ous loss. Indeed, the vitality of the 
imagination depends largely upon the 
fidelity with which its images are first 
realised in thought and then em- 
bodied by the hand. To compre- 
hend what life means In the way of 
truth and power, one must act as well 
as think and feel. For action itself 
IS a process of revelation, and the 
sincerity and power with which a 
man puts forth that which Is disclosed 
to him determine the scope of the 
disclosure of truth which he receives. 
To comprehend all that life involves 
3 33 



Work and Culture 

of experience, or offers of power, 
one must give full play to all the 
force that is in him. It is significant 
that the men of creative genius are, 
as a rule, men of the greatest pro- 
ductive power. One marvels at the 
magnitude of the work of such men 
as Michelangelo and Rembrandt, as 
Beethoven and Wagner, as Shake- 
speare, Balzac, Thackeray, Carlyle, 
and Browning ; not discerning that, 
as these master workers gave form and 
substance to their visions and insight, 
the power to see and to understand 
deepened and expanded apace with 
their achievements. 



34 



chapter IV 

The Pain of Youth 

IT is the habit of the poets, and of 
many who are poets neither in 
vision nor in faculty, to speak of 
youth as if it were a period of un- 
shadowed gaiety and pleasure, with 
no consciousness of responsibility and 
no sense of care. The freshness of 
feeling, the delight in experience, the 
joy of discovery, the unspent vitality 
which welcomes every morning as a 
challenge to one's strength, invest 
youth with a charm which art is 
always striving to preserve, and which 
men who have parted from it re- 
member with a sense of pathos ; for 
the morning of life comes but once, 
and when it fades something goes 
35 



Work and Culture 

which never returns. There are am- 
ple compensations, there are higher 
joys and deeper insights and rela- 
tionships ; but a magical charm which 
touches all things and turns them to 
gold, vanishes with the morning. In 
reaching its perfection of beauty the 
flower must part with the dewy prom- 
ise of its earliest growth. 

All this is true of youth, which in 
many ways symbolises the immortal 
part of man's nature, and must be, 
therefore, always beautiful and sacred 
to him. But it is untrue that the sky 
of youth has no clouds and the spirit 
of youth no cares ; on the contrary, 
no period of life is in many ways 
more painful. The finer the organi- 
sation and the greater the ability, 
the more difficult and trying the ex- 
periences through which the youth 
passes. George Eliot has pointed 
36 



The Pain of Youth 

out a striking peculiarity of childish 
grief in the statement that the child 
has no background of other griefs 
against which the magnitude of its 
present sorrow may be measured. 
While that sorrow lasts it is com- 
plete, absolute, and hopeless, because 
the child has no memory of other 
trials endured, of other sorrows sur- 
vived. In this fact about the earliest 
griefs lies the source also of the pains 
of youth. The young man is an un- 
developed power ; he is largely igno- 
rant of his own capacity, often without 
inward guidance towards his voca- 
tion ; he is unadjusted to the society 
in which he must find a place for 
himself He is full of energy and 
aspiration, but he does not know how 
to expend the one or realise the 
other. His soul has wings, but he 
cannot fly, because, like the eagle, he 
37 



Work and Culture 

must have space on the ground before 
he rises in the air. If his imagina- 
tion is active he has moments of 
rapture, days of exaltation, when the 
world seems to lie before him clear 
from horizon to horizon. His hours 
of study overflow with the passion 
for knowledge, and his hours of play 
are haunted by beautiful or noble 
dreams. The world is full of wonder 
and mystery, and the young explorer 
is impatient to be on his journey. 
No plan is then too great to be 
accomplished, no moral height too 
difficult to be attained. After all that 
has been said, the rapture of youth, 
when youth means opportunity, re- 
mains unexpressed. No poet will 
ever entirely compass it, as no poet 
will ever quite ensnare in speech the 
measureless joy of those festival morn- 
ings in June when Nature seems 
38 



The Pain of Youth 

on the point of speaking in human 
language. 

But this rapture is inward ; it has 
its source in the earliest perception of 
the richness of life and man's capacity 
to appropriate it. It is the rapture 
of discovery, not of possession ; the 
rapture of promise, not of achieve- 
ment. It is without the verification 
of experience or the corroborative 
evidence of performance. Youth is 
possibility ; that is its charm, its joy, 
and its power ; but it is also its limi- 
tation. There lies before it the real 
crisis through which every man of 
parts and power passes ; the develop- 
ment of the inward force and the ad- 
justment of the personality to the 
order of life. The shadow of that 
crisis is never quite absent from those 
radiant skies which the poets love to 
recall ; the uncertainty of that su- 
39 



Work and Culture 

preme issue in experience is never 
quite out of mind. Siegfried must 
meet the dragon before he can climb 
those heights on which, encircled by- 
fire, his ideal is to take the form and 
substance of reality ; and the prelu- 
sive notes of that fateful struggle are 
heard long before the sword is forged 
or the hour of destiny has come. 

There is no test of character more 
severe or difficult to bear than the 
suspense of waiting. The man who 
can act eases his soul under the great- 
est calamities ; but he who is com- 
pelled to wait, unless he be of hardy- 
fibre, eats his heart out in a futile 
despair. Troops will endure losses 
when they are caught up in the stir 
of a charge which would demoralise 
and scatter them if they were com- 
pelled to halt under the relentless guns 
of masked batteries. Now, the char- 
40 



The Pain of Youth 

acteristic trial of youth is this experi- 
ence of waiting at a moment when 
the whole nature craves expression 
and the satisfaction of action. The 
greater the volume of energy in the 
man who has yet to find his vocation 
and place, the more trying the ordeal. 
There are moments in the life of the 
young imagination when the very 
splendour of its dreams fills the soul 
with despair, because there seems no 
hope of giving them outward reality ; 
and the clearer the consciousness of 
the possession of power, the more 
poignant the feeling that it may find 
no channel through which to add 
itself to the impulsion which drives 
forward the work of society. 

The reality of this crisis in spiritual 
experience — the adjustment between 
the personality and the physical, so- 
cial, and industrial order in which 
41 



Work and Culture 

it must find its place and task — is 
the measure of its possible painful- 
ness. It is due, perhaps, to the 
charm which invests youth, as one 
looks back upon it from maturity or 
age, that its pain is forgotten and 
that sympathy withheld which youth 
craves often without knowing why it 
craves. A helpful comprehension of 
the phase of experience through 
which he is passing is often the su- 
preme need of the ardent young 
spirit. His pain has its roots in his 
ignorance of his own powers and of 
the world. He strives again and 
again to put himself in touch with 
organised work ; he takes up one 
task after another in a fruitless en- 
deavour to succeed. He does not 
know what he is fitted to do, and 
he turns helplessly from one form of 
work for which he has no faculty to 
42 



The Pain of Youth 

another for which he has less. His 
friends begin to think of him as a 
ne'er-do-weel ; and, more pathetic 
still, the shadow of failure begins to 
darken his own spirit. And yet it 
may be that in this halting, stum- 
bling, ineffective human soul, vainly 
striving to put its hand to its task, 
there is some rare gift, some splendid 
talent, waiting for the ripe hour and 
the real opportunity ! In such a 
crisis sympathetic comprehension is 
invaluable, but it is rarely given, and 
the youth works out his problem in 
isolation. If he is courageous and 
persistent he finds his place at last ; 
and work brings peace, strength, self- 
comprehension. 



43 



Chapter V 

The Year of Wandering 

GOETHE prefaces Wilhelm 
Meister's travels with some 
lines full of that sagacity which was 
so closely related to his insight: 

What shap'st thou here at the world ? 'tis 

shapen long ago ; 
The Maker shaped it, he thought it best even 

so ; 
Thy lot is appointed, go follow its hest ; 
Thy way is begun, thou must walk, and not 

rest ; 
For sorrow and care cannot alter the case ; 
And running, not raging, will win thee the 

race. 

My inheritance, how wide and fair ! 
Time is my estate : to time I *m heir. 
44 



The Year of Wandering 

Between the preparation and the 
work, the apprenticeship and the 
actual dealing with a task or an art, 
there comes, in the experience of 
many young men, a period of un- 
certainty and wandering which is 
often misunderstood and counted as 
time wasted, when it is, in fact, a 
period rich in full and free develop- 
ment. In the days when Wilhelm 
Meister was written, the fVanderjahr 
or year of travel was a recognised 
part of student life, and was held in 
high regard as contributing a valuable 
element to a complete education. 
" The Europe of the Renaissance,'* 
writes M. Wagner, " was fairly fur- 
rowed in every direction by students, 
who often travelled afoot and bare- 
foot to save their shoes." These 
wayfarers were light-hearted and often 
empty-handed ; they were in quest 
45 



Work and Culture 

of knowledge, but the intensity of 
the search was tempered by gaiety 
and ease of mood. Under a mask 
of frivolity, however, youth often 
wears a serious face, and behind ap- 
parent aimlessness there is often a 
steady and final turning of the whole 
nature towards its goal. 

Uncertainty breeds impatience ; 
and in youth, before the will is firmly 
seated and the goal clearly seen, im- 
patience often manifests itself in the 
relaxation of all forms of restraint. 
The richer the nature the greater the 
reaction which sometimes sets in at this 
period ; the more varied and power- 
ful the elements to be harmonised in 
a man's character and life, the greater 
the ferment and agitation which often 
precede the final discernment and 
acceptance of one's work. If the 
pressure of uncertainty with regard 
46 



The Year of Wandering 

to one's gifts and their uses ought to 
call out patience and sympathy, so 
ought that experience of spiritual and 
intellectual agitation which often in- 
tervenes between the training for 
life and the process of actual living. 
This experience is a true year of 
wandering, and there is nothing of 
which the wanderer stands in such 
need as the friendly hand and the 
door which stands hospitably open. 
It is the born drudge alone who is 
content to go from the school to the 
office or the shop without so much 
as asking the elementary questions 
about life. The aspiring want to 
know what is behind the occupation ; 
they must discover the spiritual 
necessity of work before they are 
ready to bend to the inevitable yoke. 
Strong natures are driven by the 
very momentum of their own moral 
47 



Work and Culture 

impulse to explore the world before 
they build in it and unite themselves 
with it ; the imagination must be fed 
with beauty and truth before they 
are content to choose their task and 
tools. It is often a sigh of greatness 
in a man that he does not quickly fit 
into his place or easily find his work. 
Let him look well at the stars before 
he bends to his task ; he will need 
to remember them when the days of 
toil come, as they must come, at 
times, to every man. Let him see 
the world with his own eyes before 
he gives to fortune those hostages 
which hold him henceforth fast-bound 
in one place. 

It is as natural for ardent and 
courageous youth to wish to know 
what is in life, what it means, and 
what it holds for its children, as for a 
child to reach for and search the things 
48 



The Year of Wandering 

that surround and attract it. Be- 
hind every real worker in the world 
is a real man, and a man has a right 
to know the conditions under which 
he must live, and the choices of 
knowledge, power, and activity which 
are offered him. In the education of 
many men and women, therefore, 
there comes the year of wandering ; 
the experience of travelling from 
knowledge to knowledge and from 
occupation to occupation. There 
are men and women, it is true, who 
are born under conditions so free and 
prosperous that the choice of work 
is made almost instinctively and 
unconsciously, and apprenticeship 
merges into mastery without any 
intervening agitation or uncertainty. 
At long intervals Nature not only 
sends a great talent into the world, 
but provides in advance for its train- 
49 



Work and Culture 

ing and for its steady direction and 
unfolding; but Nature is not often 
so minute in her provision for her 
children. Those who receive most 
generously from her hand are, for 
the most part, compeUed to discover 
their gifts and find their places in the 
general order as the result of much 
searching, and often of many failures. 
And even in the most harmonious 
natures the elements of agitation and 
ferment are rarely absent. The 
forces which go to the making of a 
powerful man can rarely be adjusted 
and blended without some disturb- 
ance of relations and conditions. 
This disturbance is sometimes in- 
jurious, because it affects the moral 
foundations upon which character 
rests ; and for this reason the signifi- 
cance of the experience in its relation 
to development ought to be sympa- 
50 



The Year of Wandering 

thetically studied. The birth of the 
imagination and of the passions, the 
perception of the richness of life, and 
the consciousness of the possession of 
the power to master and use that 
wealth, create a critical moment in the 
history of youth, — a moment richer 
in possibilities of all kinds than comes 
at any later period. Agitation and 
ferment of soul are inevitable in that 
wonderful moment. It is as idle to 
ask youth to be calm and contented 
in that supreme moment as to ask 
the discoverer who is catching his 
first glimpse of a new continent to 
avoid excitement. There are times 
when agitation is as normal as is 
self-control at other and less critical 
times. There are days in June when 
Nature seems to betray an almost 
riotous prodigality of energy ; but 
that prodigality is always well within 
51 



Work and Culture 

the limits of order. In youth that 
which is to be feared is not the ex- 
plosive force of vitality, but its wrong 
direction ; and it is at this crisis that 
youth so often makes its mute and 
unavailing appeal to maturity. The 
man who has left his year of wander- 
ing behind him forgets its joys and 
perils, and regards it as a deflection 
from a course which is now perfectly 
plain, although it may once have been 
confused and uncertain. He is criti- 
cal and condemnatory where he ought 
to be sympathetic and helpful. If he 
reflects and comprehends, he will hold 
out the hand of fellowship ; for he 
will understand that the year of wan- 
dering is not a manifestation of aim- 
lessness, but of aspiration, and that in 
its ferment and uncertainty youth is 
often guided to and finally prepared 
for its task. 

52 



chapter VI 

The Ultimate Test 

" T HAVE cut more than one field 
X of oats and wheat," writes M. 
Charles Wagner, " cradled for long 
hours under the August sky to the 
slow cadence of the blade as it swung 
to and fro, laying low at every stroke 
the heavy yellow heads. I have 
heard the quail whistle in the distant 
fields beyond the golden waves of 
wheat and the woods that looked 
blue above the vines. I have thought 
of the clamours of mankind, of the 
oven-like cities, of the problems 
which perplex the age, and my in- 
sight has grown clearer. Yes, I am 
positive that one of the great cura- 
tives of our evils, our maladies, social, 
53 



Work and Culture 

moral, and intellectual, would be a 
return to the soil, a rehabilitation of 
the work of the fields." In these 
characteristically ardent words one of 
the noblest Frenchmen of the day- 
has brought out a truth of general 
application. To come once more into 
personal relations with mother earth is 
to secure health of body and of mind ; 
and with health comes clarity of 
vision. To touch the soil as a worker 
is to set all the confined energies of 
the body free, to incite all its func- 
tions to normal activity, to secure 
that physical harmony which results 
from a full and normal play of all the 
physical forces on an adequate object. 
In like manner, true work of mind 
or technical skill brings peace, com- 
posure, sanity, to one to whom the 
proper outlet of his energy has been 
denied. To youth, possessed by an 
54 



The Ultimate Test 

almost riotous vitality, with great but 
unused powers of endurance and of 
positive action, the finding of its task 
means concentration of energy instead 
of dissipation, directness of action in- 
stead of indecision, conscious increase 
of power instead of deepened sense of 
inefficiency, and the happiness which 
rises like a pure spring from the 
depths of the soul when the whole 
nature is poised and harmonised. 
The torments of uncertainty, the 
waste and disorder of the period of 
ferment, give place to clear vision, 
free action, natural growth. There 
are few moments in life so intoxicat- 
ing as those which follow the final 
discovery of the task one is appointed 
to perform. It is a true home-com- 
ing after weary and anxious wander- 
ing ; it is the lifting of the fog off a 
perilous coast; it is the shining of 
55 



Work and Culture 

the sun after days of shrouded 
sky. 

The " storm and stress " period is 
always interesting because it predicts 
the appearance of a new power; 
and men instinctively love every 
evidence of the greatness of the race, 
as they instinctively crave the dis- 
closure of new truth. In the reaction 
against the monotony of formaHsm 
and of that deadly conventionalism 
which is the peril of^ every accepted 
method in religion, art, education, or 
politics, men are ready to welcome 
any revolt, however extravagant. Too 
much life is always better than too 
little, and the absurdities of young 
genius are nobler than the selfish pru- 
dence of aged sagacity. The wild days 
at Weimar which Klopstock looked at 
askance, and not without good rea- 
son ; the excess of passion and action 
56 



The Ultimate Test 

in Schiller's " Robbers ; *' the turbu- 
lence of the young Romanticists, with 
long hair and red waistcoats, crowd- 
ing the Theatre Fran9ais to compel 
the acceptance of "Hernani/' — these 
stormy dawns of the new day in art 
are always captivating to the imagi- 
nation. Their interest lies, however, 
not in their turbulence and disorder, 
but in their promise. If real achieve- 
ments do not follow the early out- 
break, the latter are soon forgotten ; 
if they herald a new birth of power, 
they are fixed in the memory of a 
world which, however slow and cold, 
loves to feel the fresh impulse of the 
awakening human spirit. The wild 
days at Weimar were the prelude to 
a long life of sustained energy and 
of the highest productivity; "The 
Robbers " was soon distanced and 
eclipsed by the noble works of one 
57 



Work and Culture 

of the noblest of modern spirits ; and 
to the extravagance of the ardent 
French Romanticists of 1832 suc- 
ceeded those great works in verse 
and prose which have made the last 
half-century memorable in French lit- 
erary history. 

It is the fruitage of work, not the 
wild play of undirected energy, which 
gives an epoch its decisive influence 
and a man his place and power. Both 
aspects of the " storm and stress " 
period need to be kept in mind. 
When it is tempted to condemn too 
sternly the extravagance of such a 
period, society will do well to recall 
how often this undirected or ill-di- 
rected play of energy has been the 
forerunner of a noble putting forth 
of creative power. And those who 
are involved in such an outpouring 
of new life, on the other hand, will 
58 



The Ultimate Test 

do well to remember that extrava- 
gance is never the sign of art ; that 
licence is never the liberty which sets 
free the creative force; that "storm 
and stress *' is, at the best, only a 
promise of sound work ; and that its 
importance and reality depend en- 
tirely upon the fruit it bears. 

The decisive test, in other words, 
comes when a man deals, in patience 
and fidelity, with the task which is 
set before him. Up to this point 
his life, however rich and varied, has 
been a preparation ; now comes that 
final trial of strength which is to bring 
into clear light whatever power is in 
him, be that power great or small. 
If work had no other quality, the fact 
that it settles a man's place among 
men would invest it with the highest 
dignity ; for a man's place can be 
determined only by a complete un- 
59 



Work and Culture 

folding and measurement of all the 
powers that are in him, and this pro- 
cess of development must have all 
the elements of the highest moral 
process. So great, indeed, is the im- 
portance of work from this point of 
view that it seems to involve, under 
the appearance of a provisional judg- 
ment, the weight and seriousness of 
a final judgment of men. Such a 
judgment, as every man knows who 
has the conscience either of a moral- 
ist or of an artist, is being hourly- 
registered in the growth which is 
silently accomplished through the 
steady and skilful doing of one's 
work, or in the gradual but inevitable 
decline and decay which accompany 
and follow the slovenly, indifferent, or 
unfaithful performance of one's task. 

We make or unmake ourselves 
by and through our work ; mar- 
60 



The Ultimate Test 

ring our material and spiritual for- 
tunes or discovering and possessing 
them at will. The idle talk about 
the play of chance in the world, the 
futile attempt to put on the broad 
back of circumstances that burden of 
responsibility which rests on our own 
shoulders, deceives no man in his 
saner moments. The outward fruits 
of success are not always within our 
reach, no matter how strenuous our 
struggles to pluck them ; but that in- 
ward strength, of which all forms of 
outward prosperity are but visible 
evidences, lies within the grasp of 
every true worker. Fidelity, skill, 
energy — the noble putting forth of 
one's power in some worthy form of 
work — never fail of that unfolding 
of the whole man in harmonious 
strength which is the only ultimate 
and satisfying form of success. 
6i 



Chapter VII 

Liberation 

WORK is the most continuous 
and comprehensive form of 
action ; that form which calls into 
play and presses into steady service 
the greatest number of gifts, skills, 
and powers. Into true work, there- 
fore, a man pours his nature without 
measure or stint ; and in that pro- 
cess he comes swiftly or slowly to a 
clear realisation of himself Work 
sets him face to face with himself. 
So long as he is getting ready to 
work he cannot measure his power, 
nor take full account of his resources 
of skill, intelligence, and moral en- 
durance ; but when he has closed 
with his task and put his entire force 
62 



Liberation 

into the doing of it, he comes to an 
understanding not only of but with 
himself. Under the testing process 
of actual contact with materials and 
obstacles, his strength and his weak- 
ness are revealed to him ; he learns 
what lies within his power and what 
lies beyond it ; he takes accurate 
account of his moral force, and meas- 
ures himself with some degree of ac- 
curacy against a given task or under- 
taking ; he discovers his capacity for 
growth, and begins to see, through 
the mist of the future, how far he is 
likely to go along the road he has 
chosen. He discerns his lack of skill 
in various directions, and knows how 
to secure what he needs ; in countless 
ways he measures himself and comes 
to know himself. 

For work speedily turns inward 
power into outward achievement, and 
63 



Work and Culture 

so makes it possible to take accurate 
account of what has hitherto lain 
wholly within the realm of the po- 
tential. In a very deep and true 
sense an artist faces his own soul 
when he looks at his finished work. 
He sees a bit of himself in every 
book, painting, statue, or other pro- 
duct of his energy and skill. What 
was once concealed in the mystery 
of his own nature is set in clear light 
in the work of his hands ; the reality 
or unreality of his aspirations is finally 
settled ; the question of the posses- 
sion of original power or of mere fa- 
cility is answered. The worker is no 
longer an unknown force ; he has 
been developed, revealed, measured, 
and tested. 

In this process one of his highest 
gains is the liberation of his inward 
power and the attainment of self- 
64 



Liberation 

knowledge and self-mastery. No 
man is free until he knows himself, 
and whatever helps a man to come 
to clear understanding of himself 
helps him to attain freedom. A man 
does not command his resources of 
physical strength until he has so 
trained and developed his body that 
each part supplements every other 
part and bears the strain with equal 
power of resistance. When every 
part has been developed to its high- 
est point of efficiency, and the whole 
body answers the command of the will 
with that completeness of strength 
which has its source in harmony of 
parts through unity of development, 
the man has come into full posses- 
sion of his physical resources. In like 
manner a man comes into complete 
mastery of himself when through 
self-knowledge he presses every force 
5 65 



Work and Culture 

and faculty into activity, and through 
activity secures for each its ultimate 
perfection of power and action. 

When every force within has been 
developed to its highest efficiency, 
complete liberation has been effected. 
The perfectly developed and trained 
man would have the poise and peace 
which come from the harmonious ex- 
pression of the soul through every 
form of activity, and the freedom 
which is the result of complete com- 
mand of all one's resources and the 
power to use them at will. This ul- 
timate stage of power and freedom 
has, perhaps, never been attained by 
any worker under the conditions of 
this present life ; but in the exact 
degree in which the worker ap- 
proaches this ideal does he secure 
his own freedom. The untrained 
man, whose sole resource is some 
66 



Liberation 

kind of unskilled labour, is in bond- 
age to the time and place in which 
and at which he finds himself, and to 
the opportunities and rewards close 
at hand; the trained man has the 
freedom of the whole world of work. 
Michael Angelo receives commissions 
from princes and popes ; Velasquez 
paints with kings looking over his 
shoulder ; Tesla can choose the place 
where he will work ; Mr. Gladstone 
would have found fame and fortune 
at the end of almost any road he 
chose to take. In the case of each 
of these great workers inward power 
was matured and harmonised by out- 
ward work, and through work each 
achieved freedom. 

No man is free until he can dis- 
pose of himself; until he is sought 
after instead of seeking ; until, in the 
noblest sense of the words, he com- 
67 



Work and Culture 

mands his own price in the world. 
There are men in every generation 
who push this self-development and 
self-mastery so far, and who obtain 
such a large degree of freedom in 
consequence, that the keys of all 
doors are open to them. We call 
such men masters, not to suggest 
subjection to them, but as an instinc- 
tive recognition of the fact that they 
have secured emancipation from the 
limitations from which most men 
never escape. In a world given over 
to apprenticeship these heroic spirits 
have attained the degree of master- 
ship. They have not been carried to 
commanding positions by happy tides 
of favourable circumstance ; they have 
not stumbled into greatness ; they 
have attained what they have secured 
and they hold it by virtue of superior 
intelligence, skill, and power. They 
68 



Liberation 

possess more freedom than their fel- 
lows because they have worked with 
finer insight, with steadier persistence, 
and with more passionate enthusiasm. 
They are masters because they are 
free ; but their freedom was bought 
with a great price. 



69 



Chapter VIII 

The Larger Education 

THE old Idea that the necessity 
of working was imposed upon 
men as a punishment is responsible, 
in large measure, for the radical mis- 
understanding of the function and 
uses of work which has so widely- 
prevailed. In the childhood of the 
world a garden for innocence to play 
in secured the consummation of all 
deep human longings for happiness ; 
but there is a higher state than inno- 
cence : there is the state to which 
men attain through knowledge and 
trial. Knowledge involves great 
perils, but it is better than innocu- 
ous ignorance ; virtue involves grave 
dangers, but it is nobler than inno- 
70 



The Larger Education 

cence. Character cannot be secured 
if choice between higher and lower 
aims is denied ; and without charac- 
ter the world would be meaningless. 
There can be no unfolding of charac- 
ter without growth, and growth is 
inconceivable without the aid of 
work. The process of self-expression 
through action is wrought, therefore, 
into the very structure of man's life ; 
it is not a penalty, but a spiritual 
opportunity of the highest order. It 
is the most comprehensive educa- 
tional process to which men are 
subjected, and it has done more, 
probably, than all other processes to 
lift the moral and social level of the 
race. 

Instead of being a prison, the 
workshop has been a place of train- 
ing, discipline, and education. The 
working races have been the victori- 
71 



Work and Culture 

ous races ; the non-working races 
have been the subject races. Wan- 
dering peoples who trust to what 
may be called geographical luck for 
a living often develop strong individ- 
ual qualities and traits, but they 
never develop a high degree of social 
or political organisation, nor do they 
produce literature and art. The 
native force of imagination which 
some semi-civilised races seem to 
possess never becomes creative until 
it is developed and directed by train- 
ing. Education is as essential to 
greatness of achievement in any field 
as the possession of gifts of genius. 
An untrained race, like an untrained 
man, is always at an immense disad- 
vantage, not only in the competition 
of the world, but in the working out 
of individual destiny. The necessity 
for work is so far from being a 
72 



The Larger Education 

penalty that it must be counted the 
highest moral opportunity open to 
men, and, therefore, one of the 
divinest gifts offered to the race. 
The apparent freedom of nomadic 
peoples is seen, upon closer view, to 
be a very hard and repulsive bond- 
age ; the apparent servitude of work- 
ing peoples is seen to be, upon closer 
view, an open road to freedom. 

There is no real freedom save that 
which is based upon discipline. The 
chance to do as one pleases is not 
liberty, as so many people imagine ; 
liberty involves knowledge, self- 
mastery, capacity for exertion, power 
of resistance. Emerson uncovered 
the fundamental conception when he 
declared that character is our only 
definition of freedom and power. 
Now, character is always the product 
of an educational process of some 
73 



Work and Culture 

kind; its production involves tests, 
trials, temptations, toils. It does 
not represent innocence, but that 
which is higher and more difficult of 
attainment, virtue. Innocence is the 
starting-point in life ; virtue is the 
goal. Between these two points lies 
that arduous education which is 
effected, for most men, chiefly by 
and through work. In comparison 
with the field, the shop, the factory, 
the mine, and the sea, the school has 
educated a very inconsiderable num- 
ber; the vast majority of the race 
have been trained by toil. On the 
farm, in the innumerable factories, in 
offices and stores, on sea-going craft 
of all kinds, and in the vast field of 
land transportation, the race, as a 
rule, has had its education in those 
elemental qualities which make or- 
ganised society possible. When the 
74 



The Larger Education 

race goes to its work in the morning, 
it goes to its school ; and the chief 
result of its toil is not that which it 
makes with its hands, but that which 
it slowly and unconsciously creates 
within itself. It is concerned with 
the product of its toil ; with soil, 
seed, or grain ; with wood, paper, 
metal, or stone ; with processes and 
forces ; but in the depths of the 
worker's nature there is a moral 
deposit of habit, quality, temper, 
which is the invisible moral result of 
his toil. The real profit of a day's 
work in the world can never be 
estimated in terms of money ; it 
can be estimated only in terms of 
character. 

The regularity, promptness, obedi- 
ence, fidelity, and skill demanded in 
every kind of work, skilled or un- 
skilled, compels the formation of a 
75 



Work and Culture 

certain degree of character. No 
worker can keep his place who 
does not develop certain moral quali- 
ties in connection with his work. 
Honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, and 
skill are essential to the most ele- 
mentary success, — the getting of the 
bare necessities of life; and these 
fundamental qualities, upon which 
organised society rests as on an 
immovable foundation, are the silent 
deposit of the work of the world. 
Through what seems to be the bond- 
age of toil the race is emancipated 
from the ignorance, the licence, and 
the dull monotony of savagery ; 
through what seems to be a purely 
material dealing with insensate things 
men put themselves in the way of 
the most thorough moral training. 

The necessity of working gives 
society steadiness and stability ; when 
76 



The Larger Education 

large populations are freed from this 
necessity, irresponsible mobs take the 
place of orderly citizens, and the 
crowd of idlers must be fed and 
amused to be kept out of mischief. 
A man can never be idle with safety 
and advantage until he has been so 
trained by work that he makes his 
freedom from times and tasks more 
fruitful than his toil has been. When 
work has disciplined a man, he may 
safely be left to himself; for he will 
not only govern himself, but he will 
also employ himself There are 
few worse elements in society than 
an idle leisure class, — a body of men 
and women who make mere recrea- 
tion the business of living, and so 
reverse or subvert the natural order 
of life. 

On the other hand, there is no 
more valuable element in society 
77 



Work and Culture 

than a working leisure class, — a body 
of men and women who, emancipated 
from the harder and more mechani- 
cal work of the world, give them- 
selves to the higher activities and 
enrich the common life by intelli- 
gence, beauty, charm of habit and 
manners, dignity of carriage, and dis- 
tinction of character and taste. So 
long as men need other food than 
bread, and have higher necessities 
than those of the body, a leisure 
class will be essential to the richest 
and completest social development. 
What society does not need is an 
idle class. 



78 



chapter IX 
Fellowship 

THE comradeship of work is an 
element which is rarely taken 
into account, but which is of great im- 
portance from many points of view. 
Men who work together have not 
only the same interests, but are likely 
to develop a kinship of thought and 
feeling. Their association extends 
beyond working hours, and includes 
their higher and wider interests. 
There seems to be something in the 
putting forth of effort upon the same 
material or for the same end which 
binds men together with ties which 
are not wholly the result of prox- 
imity. Those who have given no 
thought to the educational side of 
79 



Work and Culture 

work, and who are ignorant that it 
has such a side, are, nevertheless, 
brought within the unifying influence 
of a process which, using mainly the 
hands and the feet, is insensibly train- 
ing the whole nature. 

There is a deeper unity in the work 
of the world than has been clearly 
understood as yet ; there is that vital 
unity which binds together those who 
are not only engaged in a common 
task, but who are also involved in a 
common spiritual process. The very 
necessity of work carries with it the 
implication of an incomplete world 
and an imperfectly developed society. 
The earth was not finished when it 
was made ready for the appearance 
of man; it will not be finished until 
man has done with it. In the mak- 
ing of the world man has his part ; 
here, as elsewhere, he meets God and 
80 



Fellowship 

co-operates with him ; the divine and 
the human combining to perfect the 
process of unfolding and evolution. 
Until the work of men has developed 
it, the earth is raw material. It is full 
of power, but that power is not con- 
served and directed , it is full of the 
potentialities of fertility, but there are 
no harvests ; all manner of possibili- 
ties both of material and spiritual 
uses are in it, — food, ore, force, 
beauty, — but these possibilities must 
await the skill of man before they 
can be turned into wealth, comfort, 
art, civilisation. God gives the earth 
as a mine, and man must work it ; as 
a field, and man must till it; as a 
reservoir of force, and man must 
make connection with it ; as the 
rough material out of which order, 
symmetry, utility, beauty, culture 
may be wrought, and men must un- 
6 8i 



Work and Culture 

fold these higher uses by intelligence, 
skill, toil, and character. At some 
time every particle of the civilised 
world has been like the old frontier 
on this continent, and men have re- 
claimed either the desert or the wil- 
derness by their heroic sacrifices and 
labours. It is a misuse of language, 
therefore, to say that the world is 
made ; it is not made, because it is be- 
ing made century by century through 
the toil of successive generations. 

Now, this creative process, in which 
God and men unite, is what we call 
work. It is not a process introduced 
among men as an afterthought or 
as a form of punishment; it was 
involved in the initial creative act, 
and it is part of the complete crea- 
tive act. The conception of a pro- 
cess of development carries with it the 
idea, not of a finished but of an un- 
82 



Fellowship 

finished world ; it interprets history 
not as a record of persons and events 
separate from the stage upon which 
they appear, like actors on the boards, 
but as the story of the influence of an 
unfinished world upon an undevel- 
oped race, and of the marvellous un- 
folding through which the hidden 
powers and qualities of the material 
and the worker are brought into play. 
Work becomes, therefore, not only a 
continuation of the divine activity in 
the world, but a process inwrought 
in the very constitution of that 
world. Growth is the divinest ele- 
ment in life, and work is one of the 
chief factors in growth. 

The earth is, therefore, in its full 
unfolding and its final form, the joint 
product of the love and power of 
God and of the toil and sacrifice of 
men ; the creative purpose is not 
S3 



Work and Culture 

accomplished in a single act ; it is 
being wrought out through a long 
progression of acts; and in this con- 
tinuous process God and men are 
brought together in a way which 
makes the labour of the hand the 
work also of the spirit. If one re- 
flects on all that this intimate co- 
operation of the divine and the 
human in the fields, the factories, 
and the shops means, the nobility of 
work and its possibilities of spiritual 
education become impressively clear. 
In this fellowship men are trained in 
ways of which they are insensible ; 
spiritual results are accomplished 
within them, of which they are un- 
conscious. The Infinite is nowhere 
more beneficently present than in the 
strain and anguish of toil; and the 
necessity of putting forth one's 
strength in some form of activity 
84 



Fellowship 

IS not a hardship but a divine 
opportunity. 

To well-conditioned men work is 
a joy ; under normal conditions, for 
healthful men, it is always a joy. 
The spiritual meaning behind the 
hard face which toil wears makes 
itself dimly understood at times, and 
men sing at their tasks not only out 
of pure exuberance of good spirits 
and sound health, but because there 
is something essentially rhythmical 
and harmonious in their toil. The 
song of the sailor at the windlass is 
a song of fellowship ; an expres- 
sion of the deepened consciousness of 
strength and exhilaration which come 
from standing together in a joint put- 
ting forth of strength. When a man 
honestly gives himself to any kind 
of work he makes himself one with 
his fellows in the creative process ; 
85 



Work and Culture 

he enters into deepest fellowship with 
the race. And, as in the intimacy of 
the family, in its structure and habit, 
there lies a very deep and rich educa- 
tional process, so in the community 
of work there lies a training and en- 
richment which go to the very centre 
of the individual life. The ideal 
development involves harmonious 
adjustment of the man to the world, 
through complete development of 
his personality and through complete 
unity with the race ; and the deepest 
and most fruitful living is denied 
those who fail of entire unfolding in 
either of these hemispheres, which 
together make up the perfect whole. 
In genuine culture solitude and 
society must both find place ; a man 
must secure the strength and poise 
which enable him to stand alone, 
and he must also unite himself in 
86 



Fellowship 

hand, mind, and heart with his fel- 
lows. In isolation the finer parts of 
nature wither; in fellowship they 
bear noble fruitage. To work in 
one's day with one's fellows ; to 
accept their fortune, bear their bur- 
dens, perform their tasks, and accept 
their rewards ; to be one with them 
in the toil, sorrow, and joy of life, — 
is to put oneself in the way of 
the richest growth and the purest 
happiness. 



87 



chapter X 

Work and Pessimism 

WHEN perils thickened about 
him and the most courageous 
grew faint-hearted, Francis Drake's 
favourite phrase was ; " It matters not; 
God hath many things in store for 
us/* No man ever wore a more 
dauntless face in the presence of dan- 
ger than the great adventurer who 
destroyed the foundations of Spanish 
power in this continent, and whose 
smile always grew sweeter as the sit- 
uation grew more desperate. That 
smile carried the conviction of ultimate 
safety to a crew which was often on the 
verge of despair; its serenity and con- 
fidence were contagious ; it conveyed 
the impression, in the blackest hour. 



Work and Pessimism 

that the leader knew some secret way 
of escape from encircling peril. He 
knew, as a rule, no more than his 
men knew ; but as danger deepened, 
his genius became energised to the 
utmost quickness of discernment and 
the utmost rapidity of action. He 
had no time for despair ; he had only 
time for decision and action. In his 
dying hour, on a hostile sea, half a 
hemisphere from home, he arose, 
dressed himself, and called for his 
arms ; falling before the only foe to 
whom he ever yielded with the same 
dauntless courage which had made 
him the master of untravelled seas 
and the terror of a continent. He 
so completely identified himself with 
the work he had in hand that he 
sapped the very sources of fear. 

Such heroic self-forgetfulness is not 
the exclusive possession of men of ac- 
89 



Work and Culture 

tion ; it lies within the reach of any 
man who is strong enough to grasp it. 
Two writers of our time have nobly 
worn this jewel of courage in the eyes 
of the world. John Addington Sy- 
monds was for many years an invalid 
whose life hung on a thread. Fie had 
youth, gifts of a high order, culture, 
ambition, but a desolating shadow 
blackened the landscape of his life ; 
he might have yielded to the lassitude 
which came with his disease ; he might 
have become embittered and poured 
his sorrows into the ear of the world, 
as too many less burdened men and 
women have done in these recent 
decades. Instead of accepting these 
weak alternatives and wasting his 
brief years in useless complainings, 
he plucked opportunity out of the 
very jaws of death ; found in the 
high Alps the conditions most favour- 
90 



Work and Pessimism 

able for activity, and poured his life 
out in work of such sustained interest 
and value that he laid the English- 
reading peoples under lasting obliga- 
tions. In spite of his invalidism 
he achieved more than most men 
who live out the full period of 
life in complete possession of their 
powers. 

In like manner disease touched 
Robert Louis Stevenson in his early- 
prime, and would have daunted a spirit 
less gallant than his. He bore himself 
in the presence of death as a dashing 
leader bears himself in the presence 
of an overwhelming foe ; he was in- 
trepid, but he was also wise. He 
sought such alleviations as climates 
afforded a man in his condition, and 
then gave himself to his work with 
a kind of passionate ardour, as if he 
would pluck the very heart out of 
91 



Work and Culture 

time and toil before the night fell. 
Neither of these men was blind to his 
condition ; neither was indifferent; 
both loved life and both had their 
moments of revolt and depression ; 
but both found in work resource 
from despair, and both made the 
world richer not only by the fruits 
of self-conquest, but by the contagious 
power of heroic example. Such ca- 
reers put to shame the self-centred, 
egotistic, morbid pessimism which 
has found so many voices in recent 
years that its cowardly outcries have 
almost drowned the great, sane, au- 
thoritative voices of the world. 

Despair has many sources, but one 
of its chief sources is the attempt to 
put an incomplete in the place of a 
complete life, and to substitute a par- 
tial for a full and rounded develop- 
ment. The body keeps that physical 
92 



Work and Pessimism 

unconsciousness which is the evidence 
of health only so long as every part 
of it is normally used and exercised ; 
when any set of organs is ignored and 
neglected, some form of disorder be- 
gins, and sooner or later physical self- 
consciousness in some part announces 
the appearance of disease. In like 
manner, intellectual and spiritual self- 
unconsciousness, which is both the 
condition and the result of complete 
intellectual and spiritual health, is 
preserved only so long as a man lives 
freely and naturally in and through 
all his activities. Expression of the 
whole nature through every faculty is 
essential to entire sanity of mind and 
spirit. Every violation of this fun- 
damental law is followed by moral or 
spiritual disorder, loss of balance, de- 
cline of power. To see the world 
with clear eyes, as Shakespeare saw 
93 



Work and Culture 

It, instead of seeing It through dis- 
torted vision, as Paul Verlaine saw it, 
one must think, feel, and act. To 
compress one's vital power into any- 
one of these forms or channels of ex- 
pression Is to limit growth, to destroy 
the balance and symmetry of devel- 
opment, to lose clarity of vision, and 
to invite that devastating disease of 
our time and of all times, morbid 
self-consciousness. The man who 
lives exclusively In thought becomes 
a theorist, an Indliferent observer, or 
a cynic ; he who lives exclusively In 
feeling becomes a sentimentalist or a 
pessimist; he who lives exclusively 
in action becomes a mere executive 
energy, a pure objective force In so- 
ciety. These types are found In all 
times, and exhibit in a great variety 
of ways the perils of incomplete 
development. 

94 



Work and Pessimism 

In our time the chief peril for men 
of imagination and the artistic tem- 
perament comes from that aloofness 
of temper which separates its victim 
from his fellows, isolates him in the 
very heart of society, and turns his 
energy inward so that he preys upon 
himself The root of a great deal of 
that pessimism which has found ex- 
pression in modern literature is found 
in inactivity. He who contents him- 
self with looking at life as a spectator 
sees its appalling contradictions and 
its baffling confusions, and misses the 
steadying power of the common toil, 
the comprehension through sympa- 
thy, the slow but deep unfolding and 
education which come from parti- 
cipation in the world's work. He 
who approaches life only through his 
feelings is bruised, hurt, and finally 
exhausted by a strain of emotion un- 
95 



Work and Culture 

relieved by thought and action. No 
man is sound either in vision or in 
judgment who holds himself apart 
from the work of society. Participa- 
tion in that work not only liberates 
the inward energy which preys upon 
itself if repressed ; it also, through 
human fellowship, brings warmth and 
love to the solitary spirit ; above all, 
it so identifies the man with outward 
activities that his personal force finds 
free access to the world, and he is 
delivered from the peril of self-con- 
sciousness. He who cares supremely 
for some worthy activity and gives 
himself to it has no time to reflect on 
his own woes, and no temptation to 
exaggerate his own claims. He sees 
clearly that he is an undeveloped per- 
sonality to whom the supreme op- 
portunity comes in the guise of the 
discipline of work. To forget one- 
96 



Work and Pessimism 

self in heroic action as did Drake, 
or in heroic toil as did Symonds 
and Stevenson, is to make even 
disease contribute to health and 
mastery. 



97 



chapter XI 

The Educational Attitude 

THE man whose life is intelli- 
gently ordered is always pre- 
paring himself for the highest demands 
of his work ; he is not only doing that 
work with adequate skill from day to 
day, but he is always fitting himself 
in advance for more exacting and 
difficult tasks. 

If a man is to become an artist in 
his work, his specific preparation for 
particular occasions and tasks must 
be part of a general preparation for 
all possible occasions and tasks. It 
is not only impossible to foresee 
opportunities, but it is often impos- 
sible to recognise their importance 
98 



The Educational Attitude 

until they are past. It is well to 
know by heart Emerson's significant 
lines, — - 

*' Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes. 
And marching single in an endless file. 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will. 
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds 

them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp. 
Forgot my mourning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I, too late. 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.'* 

The Days, which come so unob- 
trusively and go so silently, are op- 
portunities in disguise, and to enable 
a man to penetrate that disguise and 
discern the royal figure in the meanest 
dress is one of the great ends of that 
education which must always, in some 
99 



Work and Culture 

form, precede real success. For noth- 
ing which endures is ever done with- 
out some kind of preliminary training. 
Men do not happen, by chance, upon 
greatness ; they achieve it. Noble 
work of any kind is the fruit of labo- 
rious apprenticeship, and from the 
higher forms of success the idler and 
the amateur are for ever shut out. A 
man often enters a new field or takes 
up a new tool with surprising facility 
and power ; but in these cases the 
man is only carrying into a fresh 
field the skill already acquired else- 
where. It has sometimes happened 
that a sudden occasion has called an 
obscure man to his fQtty and he has 
sat down famous. In such instances 
it is the custom to say that the orator 
has spoken without preparation ; as 
a matter of fact, the man knows that 
he has been all his life preparing for 

lOO 



The Educational Attitude 

that critical moment. If he had not 
risen full of his theme, with the rich 
material of noble speech within reach 
of his memory or imagination, he 
would have left the hour empty and 
unmarked. In such a moment a 
man rises as high as the reach of his 
nature and no higher, and the reach 
of his nature depends on the training 
he has given himself. 

The hour for commanding speech 
comes to the politician, whose study 
of public affairs is chiefly a study of 
the management of his constituents, 
and he sits down as empty as he 
arose ; the same hour, arriving unex- 
pectedly to Burke or Webster, draws 
upon vast accumulations of knowl- 
edge, thought, and illustration. In 
the famous debate with Hayne, Web- 
ster had practically but one day In 
which to prepare his reply to his 

lOI 



Work and Culture 

persuasive and accomplished adver- 
sary ; but v/hen he spoke it was to 
put into language for all time the 
deep conviction of the reality of the 
national idea. The great orator 
had scant time to make ready for the 
greatest opportunity of his life, but, 
in reality, he had been preparing 
from boyhood to make that immor- 
tal speech. Brilliant speeches are 
often made extemporaneously ; but 
such speeches are never made with- 
out long and arduous preparation. 
" The gods sell anything and to 
everybody at a fair price," says 
Emerson ; and he might have added 
that they give nothing away. What- 
ever a man secures in the way of 
power or fame he pays for in prelim- 
inary preparation ; nothing is given 
him except his native capacity ; every- 
thing else he must pay for. To rec- 

I02 



The Educational Attitude 

ognise opportunity when it comes, 
or to make the highest use of it 
when it is not to be recognised at the 
moment, involves constant enrichment 
and education of the whole nature. 

It is one of the secrets of the 
higher kind of success to make life 
interesting, and this secret is com- 
mitted mainly to those who get the 
educational value of events, condi- 
tions, and relationships. The man 
who can rationalise his entire expe- 
rience is in the way of learning the 
deepest lesson of life and of keeping 
the keenest interest in all its hap- 
penings. A mass of facts exhausts 
and wearies the student, but when 
they fall into order, disclose connec- 
tions, and reveal truth they awaken 
enthusiasm. The body of fact with- 
out the soul of truth is a dead and 
repellent thing; but if the soul of 
103 



Work and Culture 

truth shine through straightway it 
becomes vital, companionable, stimu- 
lating. Now, the most fruitful prepa- 
ration for opportunities and tasks of 
all degrees of importance is that atti- 
tude towards life which habitually 
secures from it the truth behind the 
experience and the principle behind 
the fact. Some men are enriched by 
everything they touch because they 
seem instinctively to get at the spirit- 
ual meaning of events ; other men 
get nothing but material results from 
their dealing with the world. One 
man takes nothing off his broad acres 
but crops ; another harvests his crops 
with as large results, but harvests also 
knowledge of the chemistry of nature, 
appreciation of the landscape beyond 
his own fields, and those qualities of 
character which have their root in 
honest work in the open fields. 
104 



The Educational Attitude 

A striking difference is discernible 
between two classes of men of busi- 
ness ; one class is shrewd, keen, suc- 
cessful, but entirely uninteresting, 
because it fastens its attention exclu- 
sively upon the bare, hard facts of 
the situation ; the other class is not 
only equally successful, but possesses 
a rare interest, because it penetrates 
behind the facts of trade to the laws 
of trade, studies general conditions, 
and continually deals with the situa- 
tion from the point of view of large 
intelligence. No human being is so 
entirely devoid of interest to his fel- 
lows as the trader who barters one 
community for another without any 
comprehension of higher values or 
wider connections ; on the other hand, 
few men are more interesting than the 
great merchants whose vision pene- 
trates to the principles behind busi- 
105 



Work and Culture 

ness, and who acquire a kind of wis- 
dom which is the more engaging 
because it is constantly verified by- 
contact with affairs. The man who is 
a trader never gets beyond the profit 
of his shrewd bargain ; the man who 
trains himself to study general con- 
ditions puts himself in the way, not 
only of great wealth, but of leader- 
ship and power. 

Behind every trade and occupation 
there are the most intimate human 
connections ; beneath every trade and 
occupation there are deep human re- 
lationships ; and it is only as we dis- 
cern these fundamental relations and 
connections that we get at a true con- 
ception of the magnitude of the prac- 
tical activities of society and of their 
significance in civilisation. The man 
who treats his trade as mere opportu- 
nity of making money, without tak- 
io6 



The Educational Attitude 

ing into account the service of that 
trade to men or its relation to the 
totality of social activities, is as truly 
anti-social in his spirit and methods 
as an anarchist. Such a man breaks 
society into selfish fragments, and 
turns commerce into vulgar barter- 
ing. The penalty of such a sordid 
and narrow view of life is never 
evaded; the trader makes gains and 
often swells them by hoarding; but 
he rarely secures great wealth, — 
for great fortunes are built by brains 
and force, — and he never secures 
leadership. He who is to win the 
noblest successes in the world of 
affairs must continually educate him- 
self for larger grasp of principles 
and broader grasp of conditions. 



107 



Chapter XII 

Special Training 

IT is a very superficial conception 
of workmanship which sets it 
in conflict with originality. There is 
often an inherent antagonism between 
the impulse for freedom and spon- 
taneity which is characteristic of 
genius, and a conventional, hard-and- 
fast rule or method of securing cer- 
tain technical results ; but there is 
no antagonism between the boldest 
originality and the most complete 
mastery of craftsmanship. There is, 
rather, a deep and vital relationship 
between the two. For every art is 
a language, and to secure power and 
beauty and adequacy of expression a 
man must command all . the secrets 
and resources of the form of speech 
1 08 



Special Training 

which he has chosen. The power of 
the great artist rests, in the last 
analysis, upon the freedom with 
which he uses his. material ; and this 
freedom does not come by nature ; 
it comes by training. It is fatal to 
the highest success to have the com- 
mand of a noble language and to 
have nothing to say in it; it is 
equally fatal to have noble thoughts 
and to lack the power of giving them 
expression. Technical skill is not, 
therefore, an exterior, mechanical 
possession ; it is the fitting of tools 
and material to heart and mind ; it is 
the fruit of character; it is the evi- 
dence of sincerity, thoroughness, 
truthfulness. 

In his characteristically suggestive 

comment upon the Japanese artist 

Hokusai, Mr, John La Farge gives 

an interesting account of the train- 

109 



Work and Culture 

ing established and enforced in the 
school of the Kanos, a family of 
painters which survived the vicis- 
situdes of more than four cen- 
turies. The course of study in a 
Kano school covered at least ten 
years, and the average age of gradua- 
tion was thirty. The rules of con- 
duct were rigid; the manner of life 
simple to the point of bareness ; the 
discipline of work severe and un- 
broken. During the first year and a 
half of study the pupil devoted his 
entire time to copying certain famous 
works in the possession of the school ; 
making, in the first instance, a copy 
from the picture set before him, and 
then reproducing his own copy again 
and again until every stroke and 
detail was thoroughly comprehended 
and mastered. In the course of 
eighteen months sixty pictures were 
no 



special Training 

studied with this searching thorough- 
ness ; the secrets of skill in each 
were uncovered, the sources of beauty 
or power discerned ; and the eye 
and hand of the pupil gained intelli- 
gence, quickness, penetration. Month 
after month passed in what seemed 
to be a monotony of mechanical 
imitation ; but in this arduous and 
literal reproduction of the skill of 
others was laid the sure foundations 
of individual skill. This devout 
attention to methods secured for a 
considerable number of men a techni- 
cal expertness for which we look, as 
a rule, only in the work of the great- 
est artists. The result of this train- 
ing was not mechanical skill, but 
truth and freshness of observation. 
The signature of the artist in ques- 
tion reveals not an imitative but an 
original nature, not a faculty absorbed 
III 



Work and Culture 

in accuracy but in passion for ex- 
pression : " Hokusai, the Old Man 
Crazy about Painting/* 

The arduous patience of these 
Oriental students of painting bore its 
fruit in a tradition of skill which was 
in itself an immense stimulus to the 
aspiring and ambitious ; it established 
standards of craftsmanship which made 
the possession of expert knowledge 
a necessity on the part of every one 
who seriously attempted to practice the 
art. Mr. La Farge comments upon 
the level of superior artistic culture 
which these Japanese artists had at- 
tained. They had advanced their 
common skill so far that a superior 
man began at a great height of attain- 
ment, and was compelled to exhibit 
power of a very rare order before 
he could claim any kind of prom- 
inence among his fellows. 

112 



Special Training 

The establishment of such a 
standard in any art, profession, or 
occupation has the immense educa- 
tional value of making clear to the 
student, at the very beginning of his 
career, the prime importance of mas- 
tering in detail every part of the 
work which he has undertaken to do. 
There is no place in the modern 
working world for the sloven, the in- 
different, or the unskilled ; no one 
can hope for any genuine success who 
fails to give himself the most thorough 
technical preparation, the most com- 
plete special education. Good in- 
tentions go for nothing, and industry 
is thrown away, if one cannot infuse 
a high degree of skill into his work. 
The man of medium skill depends 
upon fortunate conditions for suc- 
cess; he cannot command it, nor can 
he keep it. In the fierce competi- 
8 T13 



Work and Culture 

tion of the day the trained man has 
all the advantages on his side ; the 
untrained man invites all the tragic 
possibilities of industrial and eco- 
nomic failure. He is always at the 
mercy of conditions. To know every 
detail, to gain an insight into every 
secret, to learn every method, to 
secure every kind of skill, are 
the prime necessities of success in 
any art, craft, or trade. No time 
is too long, no study too hard, no 
discipline too severe for the attain- 
ment of complete familiarity with 
one's work and complete ease and 
skill in the doing of it. As a man 
values his working life, he must be 
willing to pay the highest price of 
success in it, — the price which severe 
training exacts. 

The external prosperity which is 
called success is of value because it 
114 



Special Training 

evidences, as a rule, thoroughness 
and ability in the man who secures 
it, and because it supplies the ease 
of body and of mind which is essen- 
tial to the fullest and most effective 
putting forth of one's power ; and 
the sane man, even while he sub- 
ordinates it to higher things, never 
entirely ignores or neglects success. 
The possession of skill is to-day the 
inexorable condition of securing this 
outward prosperity; and, as a rule, 
the greater a man's skill the more 
enduring his success. But skill has 
other and deeper uses and ends. 
Thoroughness and adequacy in the 
doing of one's work are the evidences 
of the presence of a moral conception 
in the worker's mind ; they are the 
witnesses to the pressure of his con- 
science on his work. Slovenly, care- 
less, and indifferent work is dishonest 



Work and Culture 

and untruthful ; the man who is con- 
tent to do less than the best he is 
capable of doing for any kind of 
compensation — money, reputation, 
influence — is an immoral man. He 
violates a fundamental law of life by 
accepting that which he has not 
earned. 

Skill in one's art, profession, or 
trade is conscience applied ; it is 
honesty, veracity, and fidelity using 
the eye, the voice, and the hand to 
reveal what lies in the worker's pur- 
pose and spirit. To become an 
artist in dealing with tools and 
materials is not a matter of choice or 
privilege ; it is a moral necessity ; 
for a man's heart must be in his skill, 
and a man's soul in his craftsmanship. 



ii6 



Chapter XIII 

General Training 

IT was the habit of an American 
statesman who rose to the high- 
est official position, to prepare him- 
self in advance upon every question 
which was likely to come before 
Congress by thorough and prolonged 
study. His vacations and his leisure 
hours during the session were spent 
in familiarising himself with pending 
questions in all their aspects. He 
was not content with a mastery of the 
details of a measure ; he could not 
rest until he had mastered the princi- 
ple behind it, had studied it in the 
light of history, and in its relation to 
our political institutions and charac- 
ter. His voluminous note-books 
117 



Work and Culture 

show the most thorough study, not 
only of particular measures and ques- 
tions as they came before the country 
from time to time, but of a wide 
range of related subjects. He once 
said that for every speech he had 
delivered he had prepared five ; and 
the statement throws clear light on 
a career of extraordinary growth and 
success. 

For the characteristic of this career 
was its steady expansion along intel- 
lectual Hnes. It was exceptional in 
its disclosure of that inward energy 
which carries the man who possesses 
it over all obstacles, enables him to 
master adverse conditions, to secure 
education without means and culture 
without social opportunity ; but it 
was not unexampled in a country 
which has seen many men of ulti- 
mate distinction emerge from entire 
ii8 



General Training 

obscurity. Its material success has 
been paralleled many times; but its 
intellectual success has rarely been 
paralleled. It disclosed inward dis- 
tinction ; a passion for the best in 
life and thought ; an eager desire to 
see things in their largest relations. 
And so out of conditions which gen- 
erally breed the politician the states- 
man was slowly matured. History, 
religion, literature, art were objects 
of his constant and familiar study ; 
and he made himself rich in general 
knowledge as well as in specific infor- 
mation. This ample background of 
knowledge of the best which the 
world has known and done in all 
the great fields of its activity gave 
his discussions of specific questions 
breadth, variety, charm, and literary 
interest. He brought to the partic- 
ular measure largeness of view, dis- 
119 



Work and Culture 

passionateness of temper, and the 
philosophic mind ; and his work came 
to have cultural significance and 
quality. 

Such a career, the record of which 
may be clearly traced not only in 
public history but in a vast mass 
of preparatory notes and memoranda 
of every description, illustrates in a 
very noble way the importance of 
that constant and general preparation 
which ought to include special prepar- 
ation as a landscape includes the indi- 
vidual field. That field may have 
great value and ought to have the 
most careful tillage ; but it cannot be 
separated, in any just and true vision, 
from the other fields which it touches 
and which run, in unbroken continu- 
ity, to the horizon ; and this prepa- 
ration not only involves the fruitful 
attitude towards life upon which com- 

I20 



General Training 

ment has been made, but it involves 
also constant study in many direc- 
tions with the definite purpose of 
enrichment and enlargement. No 
kind of knowledge comes amiss in 
this larger training. History, liter- 
ature, art, and science have their 
different kinds of nurture to impart, 
and their different kinds of material 
to supply ; and the wise man will 
open his mind to their teaching and 
his nature to their ripening touch. 
The widely accepted idea that a man 
not only needs nothing more for a 
specific task than the specific skill 
which it demands, but that any larger 
skill tends to superficiality, is the 
product of that tendency to excessive 
specialisation which has impaired the 
harmony of modern education and 
dwarfed many men of large native 
capacity. 

121 



Work and Culture 

In some departments of knowledge 
and activity the demands are so great 
on time and strength that the man 
who works in them can hardly ven- 
ture outside of them without impair- 
ing the totality of his achievement ; 
but even in these cases it is often a 
question whether too great a price has 
not been paid for a narrow and highly 
specialised skill. There is not only 
no conflict between a high degree of 
technical skill and wide interests and 
knowledge ; there is a clear and defi- 
nite connection between the two. 
For in all those higher forms of work 
which involve not only expert work- 
manship but a spiritual content of 
some kind, the worker must bring to 
his task not only skill but ideas, 
force, personality, temperament ; and, 
sound workmanship being secured, 
his rank will depend not on specific 



General Training 

expertness, but on the depth, energy, 
and splendour of the personality 
which the work reveals. 

Creative men feel the necessity of 
many interests and of wide activities. 
Their natures require rich pasturage ; 
they must be fed from many sources. 
They secure the skill of the specialist, 
but they never accept his limitations 
of interest and work. The clearer 
their vision of the unity of all forms 
of human action and expression, the 
deeper their need of studying at first 
hand these different forms of action 
and expression. Goethe did not 
choose that comprehensiveness of 
temper which led him into so many 
fields ; it was the necessity of a mind 
vast in its range and deep in its in- 
sight. Herbert Spencer has done 
work which discloses at every point 
the tireless industry and rigorous 
123 



Work and Culture 

method of the speciaHst; but the 
field in which he has concentrated 
his energy has included practically 
the development of the universe and 
of human life and society. Mr. 
Gladstone was a master of all the 
details, skill, and knowledge of his 
profession ; but how greatly he gained 
in power by the breadth of his inter- 
ests, and what charm there was in 
the disclosure of the man of religious 
enthusiasm, of ardent devotion, and 
of ripe culture behind the politician 
and statesman ! 

Byron knew the secrets of the art 
which he practiced with such splen- 
did success as few men have known 
them. His command of the lyric 
form was complete. And yet who 
that loves his work has not felt that 
lack in it which Matthew Arnold 
had in mind when he said that with 
124 



General Training 

all his genius Byron had the ideas of 
a country squire ? The poet was 
a master of the technique of his 
art ; he had rare gifts of passion and 
imagination ; but he lacked breadth, 
variety, and depth of thought. There 
is a monotony of theme and of mo- 
tive in his compositions. Tennyson, 
on the other hand, exalted his tech- 
nical skill by the reality and richness 
of his culture. Nothing which con- 
tains and reveals the human spirit 
was alien to him. He did not casu- 
ally touch a great range of themes ; he 
studied them patiently, thoroughly, 
persistently. Religion, philosophy, 
science, literature, history were his 
familiar friends ; he lived with them, 
and they so completely confided to 
him their richest truths that he be- 
came their interpreter. So wide were 
his interests and so varied his studies 
125 



Work and Culture 

that he came to be one of those men 
in whom the deeper currents of an age 
flow together and from whom the tu- 
mult of angry and contending currents 
issues in a great harmonious tide. No 
modern man has prepared himself 
more intelligently for specific excel- 
lence by special training, and no 
man has more splendidly illustrated 
the necessity of combining the expert- 
ness of the skilled workman with the 
insight, power, and culture of a great 
personality. A life which issues in 
an art so beautiful in form and so 
significant in content reveals both 
the necessity of constant and general 
preparation, and the identity of great 
working power with great spiritual 
energy. 



126 



Chapter XIV 

The Ultimate Aim 

WORKERS of all kinds are 
divided into two classes by 
differences of skill and by differ- 
ences of aim. The artist not only 
handles his materials in a different 
way from that which the artisan 
employs, but he uses them for a dif- 
ferent end and in a different spirit. 
The peculiar spiritual quality of the 
artist is his supreme concern with 
the quality of his work and his sub- 
ordinate interest in the returns of 
reputation or money which the work 
brings him. No wise man ought to 
be indifferent to recognition and to 
material rewards, because there is a 
vital relation between honest work 
127 



Work and Culture 

and adequate wages of all kinds ; a 
relation as clearly existing in the 
case of Michael Angelo or of William 
Shakespeare as in the case of the farm- 
hand or the day labourer. But when 
the artist plans his work, and while 
he is putting his life into it day 
by day, the possible rewards which 
await him are overshadowed by the 
supreme necessity of making the work 
sound, true, adequate, and noble. A 
man is at his best only when he pours 
out his vital energy at full tide, with- 
out thought or care for anything save 
complete self-expression. 

He who hopes to reach the high- 
est level of activity in work will not 
aim, therefore, to gain specific ends 
or to touch external goals of any 
kind ; he will aim at complete self- 
development. His ultimate aim will 
be not material but spiritual ; he 
128 



The Ultimate Aim 

cannot rest short of the perfect self- 
expression. The rewards of work — 
money, influence, position, fame — 
will be the incidents, not the ends, of 
his toil. He has a right to look for 
them and count upon them ; but if 
he be a true workman they will 
never be his inspirations, nor can 
they ever be his highest rewards. 
The man in public life who sets out 
to secure a certain official position as 
the ultimate goal of his ambition 
may be a successful politician but 
can never be a statesman ; for a 
statesman is supremely concerned with 
the interests of the state, and only 
subordinately with his own interests. 
Such a man may definitely seek a 
Presidency or a Premiership ; but 
he will seek it, in any final analysis 
of his motives, not for that which it 
will give him in the way of reward, 
9 129 



Work and Culture 

but for that which it will give him in 
the way of opportunity. A genuine 
man seeks a great place, not that he 
may be seen of men, but that he may 
speak, influence and lead men. 

The motives of the vast majority 
of men are, to a certain extent, con- 
fused and contradictory ; for the 
noblest man never quite completes 
his education and brings his nature 
into final harmony ; but the genuine 
man is inspired by generous motives, 
and to such an one success becomes 
not a snare but an education, in the 
process of which all that is noblest 
becomes controlling and all that is 
merely personal becomes subordi- 
nate. In this way the politician often 
develops into the statesman, and the 
merely clever and successful painter 
or writer grows to the stature of the 
artist. It is one of the saving quali- 
130 



The Ultimate Aim 

ties of ability that it has the power of 
growth, and great responsibilities often 
educate an able man out of selfish 
aims. 

The ultimate aim which the worker 
sets before him ought always to have 
a touch of idealism because it must 
always remain a little beyond his 
reach. The man who attains his ul- 
timate aim has come to the end of 
the race ; there are no more goals to 
beckon him on ; there is no more 
inspiration or delight in life. But 
no man ought ever to come to the 
end of the road ; there ought always 
to be a further stretch of highway, 
an inviting turn under the shadow 
of the trees, a bold ascent, an untrod- 
den summit shining beyond. 

If a man sets a specific position or 
an external reward of any kind before 
him as the Hmit of his journey, he is 
131 



Work and Culture 

in danger of getting to the end before 
he has fully put forth his strength, and 
so giving his life the pathos of an 
anti-climax. The more noble and 
able a man is, the less satisfaction 
can he find in any material return 
which his work brings him ; no man 
with a touch of the artist in him can 
ever rest content with anything short 
of the complete putting forth of all 
that is in him, and the consciousness 
of having done his work well. 

For a man's ultimate responsibility 
is met by what he is and does, not by 
what he gains. When he sets an ex- 
terior reward of any kind before him 
as the final goal of his endeavour, he 
breaks away from the divine order 
of life and destroys that deep interior 
harmony which ought to keep a 
man's spirit in time and tune with 
the creative element in the world. 
132 



The Ultimate Aim 

We are not to seek specific re- 
wards ; they must come to us. They 
are the recognition and fruit of work, 
not its inspiration and sustaining 
power. Let a man select the right 
seed and give it the right soil, and 
sun, rain, and the warm earth must 
do the rest. Goethe touched the 
heart of the matter when he wrote : 

" Shoot your own thread right through the earthly- 
tissue 
Bravely ; and leave the gods to find the issue." 

In all work of the highest quality 
God must be taken into account. 
No man works in isolation and soli- 
tude ; he works within the circle of a 
divine order, and his chief concern is 
to work with that order. To aim 
exclusively at one's own advance- 
ment and ease is to put oneself out- 
side that order and to sever oneself 
^33 



Work and Culture 

from those sources of power which 
feed and sustain all whom they reach. 
In that order a man finds his place 
by bringing to perfection all that is 
in him, and so making himself a new 
centre of life and power among men. 
Whatever is true of the religious 
life is true also of the working life ; 
the two are different aspects of the 
same vital experience. In the field 
of work he who would keep his life 
must lose it, and in losing his life a 
man secures it for immortality. The 
noble worker pours himself into his 
work with sublime indifference to its 
rewards, and by the very complete- 
ness of his self-surrender and self- 
forgetful ness touches degrees of ex- 
cellence and attains a splendour of 
vision which are denied those whose 
ventures are less daring and com- 
plete. And the largeness of concep- 
134 



The Ultimate Aim 

tion, the breadth of treatment, the 
beauty of skill which a man gains 
when he casts all his spiritual fortune 
into his work often secure the richest 
measure of those returns which men 
value so highly because they are the 
tangible evidences of success. No 
man can forget himself for the sake 
of fame; but let him forget himself 
for the sake of his work, and fame 
will gladly serve him while lesser 
men are vainly wooing her. The 
man who is superior to fortune is 
much more likely to be fortunate 
than he who flatters fortune and 
wears her livery. Notwithstanding 
the successes that attend cleverness 
and dexterity and the flattery of 
popular taste and the study of the 
weaknesses of men, it remains true 
that greatness rules in every sphere, 
and that in the exact degree in which 
135 



Work and Culture 

a man is superior is he authorita- 
tive and finally successful. Notoriety 
is easily bought, but fame remains 
unpurchasable ; external successes, 
sought as final ends, are but the 
hollow mockeries of true achieve- 
ment. 



136 



Chapter XV 

Securing Right Conditions 

TO secure the finest growth of 
a plant there must be a care- 
ful study of the conditions of soil, 
exposure, and moisture, or sun which 
it needs ; when these conditions are 
supplied and the necessary oversight 
furnished, nature may be trusted to 
do her work with ideal completeness. 
Now, the perfect unfolding of a rich 
personality involves the utmost in- 
telligence in the discernment of the 
conditions which are essential, and 
the utmost persistence in the main- 
tenance of those conditions after they 
have been secured. Perfectly devel- 
oped men and women are rare, not 
only because circumstances are so 
137 



Work and Culture 

often unfavourable, but also because 
so little thought is given, as a rule, 
to this aspect of life. The majority 
of men make use of such conditions 
and material as they find at hand ; 
they do not make a thorough study 
of the things they need, and then 
resolutely set about the work of 
securing these essential things. 
Many men use faithfully the oppor- 
tunities which come to hand, but they 
do not, by taking thought, convert 
the whole of life into one great 
opportunity. 

When a man discovers that he has 
a special gift or talent, his first duty 
is to turn that gift into personal 
power by securing its fullest devel- 
opment. The recognition of such 
a gift generally brings with it the 
knowledge of the conditions which it 
needs for its complete unfolding ; 
138 



Securing Right Conditions 

and when that discovery is made a 
man holds the clew to the solution of 
the problem of his life. The world 
is full of unintelligent sacrifice, — 
sacrifice which is sound in motive, and 
therefore does not fail to secure cer- 
tain results in character, but which is 
lacking in clear discernment, and fails, 
therefore, to accomplish the purpose 
for which it was made. Such un- 
availing sacrifice is always pathetic, 
for it involves a waste of spiritual 
power. One of the chief sources of 
this kind of waste is the habit which 
so many American communities have 
formed of calling a man into all 
kinds of activity before he has had 
time to thoroughly train and develop 
himself. Let a young teacher, 
preacher, speaker, or artist give prom- 
ise of an unusual kind, and straight- 
way all manner of enterprises solicit 
139 



Work and Culture 

his support, local organisations and 
movements urge their claims upon 
him, reforms and philanthropies com- 
mand his active co-operation ; and if 
he wisely resists the pressure he is in 
the way of being set down as selfish, 
unenterprising, and lacking in public 
spirit. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases, 
it is the community, not the individ- 
ual, which is selfish ; for communi- 
ties are often ruthless destroyers of 
promising youth. 

The gifted young preacher must 
clearly discern the needs of his 
own nature or he will miss the 
one thing which he was probably 
sent into the world to accom- 
plish, the one thing which all men 
are sent into the world to se- 
cure, — free and noble self-develop- 
ment. He must be wiser than his 
140 



Securing Right Conditions 

parish or the community ; he must 
recognise the peril which comes from 
the too close pressure of near duties 
at the start. The community will 
thoughtlessly rob him of the time, 
the quiet, and the repose necessary 
for the unfolding of his spirit ; it 
will drain him in a few years of the 
energy which ought to be spread over 
a long period of time ; and at the 
end of a decade it will begin to 
say, under its breath, that its victim 
has not fulfilled the promise of 
his youth. It will fail to discern 
that it has blighted that promise 
by its own urgent demands. The 
young preacher who is eager to give 
the community the very greatest 
service in his power will protect it 
and himself by locking his study 
door and resolutely keeping it 
locked. 

141 



Work and Culture 

The young artist and writer must 
pass through the same ordeal, and 
must learn before it is too late that 
he who is to render the highest ser- 
vice to his fellows must be most in- 
dependent in his relations to them. 
He cannot commit the management 
of his life to others without maiming 
or blighting it. The community in- 
sists upon immediate activity at the 
expense of ultimate service, upon 
present productivity at the cost of 
ultimate power. The artist must 
learn, therefore, to bar his door 
against the public until he has so 
matured his own strength and deter- 
mined his own methods that neither 
crowds nor applause nor demands 
can confuse or disturb him. The 
great spirits who have nourished the 
best life of the race have not 
turned to their fellows for their aims 
142 



Securing Right Conditions 

and habits of work ; they have taken 
counsel of that ancient oracle which 
speaks in every man's soul, and to 
that counsel they have remained 
steadfastly true. There is no clearer 
disclosure of divine guidance in the 
confusion of human aims and coun- 
sels than the presence of a distinct 
faculty or gift in a man ; and when 
such a gift reveals itself a man must 
follow it, though it cost him every- 
thing which is most dear; and he 
must give it the largest opportunity 
of growth, though he face the 
criticism of the world in the en- 
deavour. 

Life is always a struggle, and no 
man comes to any kind of mastery 
without a conflict. The really great 
man is often compelled to fight for 
his ricrht to live in the freedom of 
spirit. Prophets, poets, teachers, and 

lo 143 



Work and Culture 

artists have known the scorn, hatred, 
and rejection of society ; they have 
known also its flatteries, rewards, and 
imperious demands; and they have 
learned that in both moods society is 
the foe of the highest development 
and of the noblest talent. He who 
breaks under the scorn or yields to 
the adulation becomes the creature of 
those whom he would serve, and so 
misses his own highest fortune and 
theirs as well ; he who forgets the 
indifference in steadfast work, and 
holds to his aims and habits when 
success knocks at his door, gains the 
most and the best for himself and for 
others. 

For the highest service which a 
man can render to his kind is possi- 
ble only when he secures for himself 
the largest and noblest development ; 
to stop short of that development is 
144 



Securing Right Conditions 

to rob himself and society. Selfish- 
ness does not lie in turning a deaf 
ear to present calls for work and 
help ; it lies in indifference to the 
ultimate call. Goethe was by no 
means a man of symmetrical character, 
and there were reaches of spiritual 
life which he never traversed ; but 
the charge of selfishness urged against 
him because he gave himself up com- 
pletely to the work which he set out 
to do cannot be sustained. The 
very noblest service which he could 
render to the world was to hold him- 
self apart from its multiform activities 
in order that he might enrich every 
department of its thought. For life 
consists not only in the doing of 
present duties, but in the unfolding of 
the relations of men to the entire 
spiritual order of which they are part, 
and in the enrichment of human 

lo 145 



Work and Culture 

experience by insight, interpretation, 
and the play of the creative fac- 
ulties. The artist finds his use 
in the enrichment of Hfe, and his 
place in the order of service is 
certainly not less assured and noble 
than that of the man of action. Such 
a nature as Dante's does more for 
men than a host of those who are 
doing near duties and performing the 
daily work of the world. Let no 
man decry the spiritual greatness of 
these obvious claims and tasks ; but, 
on the other hand, let not the man 
of practical affairs and of what may 
be called the executive side of ethical 
activity decry the artists, the thinkers, 
and the poets. 

It is the duty of some men to 
leave reforms alone, and to give them- 
selves up to study, meditation, and 
the creative spirit and mood. Of men 
146 



Securing Right Conditions 

of practical ability the world stands 
in little need ; of men of spiritual 
insight, imaginative force, and creative 
energy it stands in sore need. When 
such a gift appears it ought to be 
sacredly guarded. It may be that it 
has a work to do which demands 
absolute detachment from the ordi- 
nary affairs of society. To assault it 
with the claims of the hour is to de- 
feat its purpose and rob the future. 
It must have quiet, leisure, repose. 
Let it dream for a while in the silence 
of sweet gardens, within the walls of 
universities, in the fruitful peace of 
undisturbed days ; for out of such 
dreams have come " As You Like It," 
" The Tempest," " In Memoriam," 
and " The Vision of Sir Launfal." 
Out of such conditions have come 
also the work of Darwin, Spencer, 
Martineau, Maurice, Jowett, and 
147 



Work and Culture 

Childs. He who is bent on mak- 
ing a wise use of his abilities may 
safely be left to choose his own 
methods and to create his own con- 
ditions. 



148 



Chapter XVI 

Concentration 

"X^rHEN a man has discovered 
^ ^ the conditions which are 
necessary to his most complete devel- 
opment, he will, if he is wise and 
strong, resolutely preserve these con- 
ditions from all disturbing influences 
and claims. He will not hesitate to 
disappoint the early and eager expec- 
tation of his friends by devoting 
himself to practice while they are 
clamorous for work ; he will take 
twenty years for preparation, if ne- 
cessary, and cheerfully accept indiffer- 
ence and the pangs of being forgotten, 
if at the end of that time he can do 
a higher work in a better way. He 
149 



Work and Culture 

who takes a long range must expect 
that his target will be invisible to 
those who happen to be taking note 
of him ; he will need, therefore, to 
have a very clear perception of the 
end he is pursuing, and great per- 
sistence in the pursuit of that end. 

The alertness and facility of the 
American temperament are very en- 
gaging and useful qualities, but they 
involve serious perils for those who 
are bent upon doing the best thing in 
the best way. The man who can turn 
his hand readily to many things is 
likely to do many things well, but to 
do nothing with commanding force 
and skill. One may have a fund of 
energy which needs more than one 
field to give it adequate play ; but he 
who hopes to achieve genuine dis- 
tinction in any kind of production 
must give some particular work the 
150 



Concentration 

first place in his interest and activity, 
and must pour his whole soul into the 
doing of that work. A man may en- 
joy many diversions by the way, but 
he must never forget the end of his 
journey. If he is wise, he will not 
hasten ; he will not miss the sights and 
sounds and pleasures which give 
variety to travel and bring rest to the 
traveller; but he will hold all these 
things subordinate to the accomplish- 
ment of his journey. He will rest for 
the sake of the strength it will give 
him ; he will turn aside for the enjoy- 
ment of the view ; he will linger in 
sweet and silent places to take coun- 
sel with his own thoughts ; but the 
staff and wallet will never be laid 
aside. 

There are no men so interesting as 
those who are quietly and steadfastly 
following some distant aim which is 



Work and Culture 

invisible to others. One recognises 
them because they seem to be moving 
silently but surely onward. Skill, 
insight, and power steadily flow to 
them ; and, apparently without effort, 
they climb step by step the steep 
acclivity where influence and fame 
abide. They are supremely interest- 
ing because, through absorption in 
their work, they are largely free from 
self-consciousness, and because they 
bring with them the air and stir of 
growth and movement. They rarely 
obtrude their interests or pursuits 
upon others, but they give the 
impression of a definiteness of aim 
which cannot be obscured or blurred, 
and a concentration of energy which 
steadily reacts in increase of power. 
They are not only the heroic work- 
ers of the world, but they also set 
in motion the deeper currents of 
152 



Concentration 

thought and action ; into the atmos- 
phere of a sluggish age they infuse 
freshness and vitality ; they do not 
drift with majorities, they determine 
their own courses, and sweep others 
into the wide circles of influence 
which issue from them. They are 
the leaders, organisers, energising 
spirits of society ; they do not copy, 
but create ; they do not accept, 
but form conditions ; they mould life 
to their purpose, and stamp them- 
selves on materials. 

To the making of genuine careers 
concentration is quite as essential as 
energy ; to achieve the highest suc- 
cess, a man must not only be willing 
to pour out his vitality without stint 
or measure, but he must also be will- 
ing to give himself. For concentra- 
tion is, at bottom, entire surrender of 
one's life to some definite end. In 
153 



Work and Culture 

order to focus all one's powers at a 
single point, there must be aban- 
donment of a wide field of interest 
and pleasure. One would like to do 
many things and take into himself 
many kinds of knowledge, many 
forms of influence ; but if one is to 
master an art, a craft, or a profession, 
one must be willing to leave many 
paths untrod, to build many walls, 
and to lock many doors. When the 
boy has learned his lessons he may 
roam the fields and float on the river 
at his own sweet will ; but so long as 
he is at the desk he must be deaf to 
the invitation of sky and woods. 
When a man has mastered his work 
he may safely roam the world ; but 
while he is an apprentice let him be 
deaf and blind to all things that 
interrupt or divert or dissipate the 
energies. 

154 



Concentration 

Mr. Gladstone's astonishing range 
of interests and occupations was 
made possible by his power of con- 
centration. He gave himself com- 
pletely to the work in hand ; all his 
knowledge, energy, and ability were 
focussed on that work, so that his 
whole personality was brought to a 
point of intense light and heat, as the 
rays of the sun are brought to a point 
in a burning-glass. When the power 
of concentration reaches this stage of 
development, it liberates a man from 
dependence upon times, places, and 
conditions ; it makes privacy possible 
in crowds, and silence accessible in 
tumults of sound ; it withdraws a 
man so completely from his surround- 
ings that he secures complete isolation 
as readily as if the magic carpet of the 
" Arabian Nights " were under him 
to bear him on the instant into the 
155 



Work and Culture 

solitude of lonely deserts or inaccess- 
ible mountains. More than this, it 
enables a man to work with the 
utmost rapidity, to complete his task 
in the shortest space of time, and to 
secure for himself, therefore, the 
widest margin of time for his own 
pleasure and recreation. 

The marked differences of working 
power among men are due chiefly to 
differences in the power of concentra- 
tion. A retentive and accurate memory 
is conditioned upon close attention. 
If one gives entire attention to what 
is passing before him, he is not likely 
to forget it or to confuse persons or 
incidents. The book which one 
reads with eyes which are continually 
lifted from the page may furnish 
entertainment for the moment, but 
cannot enrich the reader, because it 
cannot become part of his knowledge. 
156 



Concentration 

Attention is the simplest form of 
concentration, and its value illustrates 
the supreme importance of that 
focussing of all the powers upon the 
thing in hand which may be called 
the sustained attention of the whole 
nature. 

Here, as everywhere in the field of 
man's life, there enters that element 
of sacrifice without which no real 
achievement is possible. To secure 
a great end, one must be willing to 
pay a great price. The exact adjust- 
ment of achievement to sacrifice 
makes us aware, at every step, of the 
invisible spiritual order with which 
all men are in contact in every kind 
of endeavour. If the highest skill 
could be secured without long and 
painful effort it would be wasted 
through ignorance of its value, or 
misused through lack of education ; 
157 



Work and Culture 

but a man rarely attains great skill 
without undergoing a discipline of 
self-denial and work which gives 
him steadiness, restraint, and a certain 
kind of character. The giving up of 
pleasures which are wholesome, the 
turning aside from fields which are 
inviting, the steady refusal of invita- 
tions and claims which one would be 
glad to accept or recognise, invest 
the power of concentration with 
moral quality, and throw a searching 
light on the nature of all genuine 
success. To do one thing well, a man 
must be willing to hold all other in- 
terests and activities subordinate ; to 
attain the largest freedom, a man 
must first bear the cross of self- 
denial. 



158 



Chapter XVII 

Relaxation 

I'^HE ability to relax the tension 
of work is as important as the 
power of concentration; for the two 
processes combine in the doing of 
the highest kind of work. There 
are, it is true, great differences be- 
tween men in capacity for sustained 
toil. Some men are able to put 
forth their energy at the highest 
point of efficiency for a short time 
only, while the endurance of others 
seems to be almost without limit. 
In manual or mechanical work it 
is mainly a question of physical or 
nervous resources ; in creative work, 
however, relaxation is not a matter of 
159 



Work and Culture 

choice ; it is a matter of necessity, 
because it affects the quality of the 
product. In the alertness of atten- 
tion, the full activity of every faculty, 
the glow of the imagination, which 
accompany the putting forth of the 
creative power, the whole force of 
the worker is concentrated and his 
whole nature is under the highest 
tension. Everything he holds of 
knowledge, skill, experience, emotion 
flows to one point ; as waters which 
have gathered from the surface of a 
great stretch of country sometimes 
run together and sweep, in deep, 
swift current, through a narrow pass. 
In such moments there is a concen- 
tration of thought, imagination, and 
spiritual energy which fuses all the 
forces of the worker into one force 
and directs that force to a single 
point. 

i6o 



Relaxation 

In such a moment there is obvi- 
ously a closing in of a man's nature 
from outward influences. The very 
momentum with which the absorbed 
worker is urged on in the accom- 
plishment of his design shuts him 
from those approaches of truth and 
knowledge which are made only 
when the mind is at ease. One sees 
a hundred things in the woods as he 
saunters through their depths which 
are invisible as he rushes through on 
a flying train; and one is conscious 
of a vast world of sights, sounds, and 
odours when he sits out of doors at 
ease, of which he is oblivious when 
he is absorbed in any kind of task. 
Now, in order to give work the 
individuality and freshness of the 
creative spirit, one must be, at certain 
times, as open to these manifold in- 
fluences from without as one must 
II i6i 



Work and Culture 

be, at other times, closed against 
them ; the tension of the whole being 
which is necessary for the highest 
achievement must be intermitted. 
The flow of energy must be stopped 
at intervals in order that the reser- 
voir may have time to fill. In the 
lower forms of work relaxation is 
necessary for health ; in the higher 
forms of work it is essential for 
creativeness. 

It is a very superficial view of the 
nature of man which limits growth 
to periods of self-conscious activity ; 
a view so superficial that it not only 
betrays ignorance of the real nature 
of man*s relation to his world, but 
also of the real nature of work. 
Activity is not necessarily work ; it 
is often motion without direction, 
progress, or productiveness ; mere 
waste of energy. In every field of 
162 



Relaxation 

life — religious, intellectual, material 
— there is an immense amount of 
activity which is sheer waste of 
power. Work is energy intelligently 
put forth ; and intelligence in work 
depends largely upon keeping the 
whole nature in close and constant 
relation with all the sources of power. 
To be always doing something is to 
be as useless for the higher purposes 
of growth and influence as to be 
always idle ; one can do nothing 
with a great show of energy, and one 
can do much with very little appar- 
ent effort. In no field of work is 
the difference between barren and 
fruitful activity more evident than in 
teaching. Every one who has ac- 
quaintance with teachers knows the 
two types : the man who is never at 
rest, but who pushes through the 
school day, watch in hand, with 
163 



Work and Culture 

gongs sounding, monitors marking, 
classes marching, recitations begin- 
ning and ending with military pre- 
cision, sharply defined sections in 
each text-book arbitrarily covered in 
each period ; a mechanic of tireless 
activity, who never by any chance 
touches the heart of the subject, 
opens the mind of the pupil, enriches 
his imagination, or liberates his per- 
sonaUty : and the other type, the 
real teacher, who is concerned not to 
sustain a mechanical industry, but to 
create a dynamic energy ; who cares 
more for truth than for facts, for 
ability than for dexterity, for skill of 
the soul than for cunning of the 
brain ; who aims to put his pupil in 
heart with nature as well as in touch 
with her phenomena ; to disclose the 
formative spirit in history as well as 
to convey accurate information ; to 
"164 



Relaxation 

uncover the depths of human life in 
literature as well as to set periods 
of literary development in external 
order. Such a man may use few 
methods, and attach small importance 
to them ; the railroad atmosphere 
of the schedule may be hateful to 
him in the school-room ; but he is 
the real worker, for he achieves 
that which his noisier and more 
bustling colleague misses, — the ed- 
ucation of his pupils. He is not 
content to impart knowledge ; he 
must also impart culture ; for 
without culture knowledge is the 
barren possession of the intellectual 
artisan. 

Now, culture involves repose, 
openness of mind, that spiritual 
hospitality which is possible only 
when the nature is relaxed and lies 
fallow like the fields which are set 
165 



Work and Culture 

aside in order that they may regain 
fertility. The higher the worker the 
deeper the need of relaxation in 
the large sense. A man must be 
nourished before he can feed others ; 
must be enriched in his own nature 
before he can make others rich ; 
must be inspired before he reveal, 
prophesy, or create in any field. If 
he makes himself wholly a working 
power, he isolates himself from the 
refreshment and re-creative power of 
the living universe in which he toils; 
in that isolation he may do many 
things with feverish haste, but he 
can do nothing with commanding 
ability. He narrows his energy to a 
rivulet by cutting himself off from 
the hills on which the feeding springs 
rise and the clouds pour down their 
richness. The rivulet may be swift, 
but it can never have depth, volume, 
1 66 



Relaxation 

or force. The great streams in 
which the stars shine and on which 
the sails of commerce whiten and 
fade are fed by half a conti- 
nent. 

To the man who is bent upon the 
highest personal efficiency through 
the most complete self-development a 
large part of life must be set aside 
for that relaxation which, by relief 
from tension and from concentration, 
puts the worker into relation with 
the influences and forces that nourish 
and inspire the spirit. The more 
one can gain in his passive moods, 
the more will he have to give in his 
active moods ; for the greater the 
range of one's thought, the truer 
one's insight, and the deeper one's 
force of imagination, the more will 
one's skill express and convey. A 
man's life ought to be immensely in 
167 



Work and Culture 

excess of his expression, and a man's 
life has its springs far below the plane 
of his work. Emerson's work re- 
veals the man, because it contains the 
man, but the man was fashioned 
before the work began. The work 
played no small part in the unfolding 
of the man's nature, but that which 
gave the work individuality and 
authority antedated both poems and 
essays. These primal qualities had 
their source in the personality of the 
thinker and poet, and were developed 
and refined by long intimacy with 
nature, by that fruitful quietness 
and solitude which open the soul to 
the approach of the deepest truths 
and most Hberating experiences. 
Emerson knew how to relax, to sur- 
render to the hour and the place, to 
invite the higher powers by throwing 
all the doors open ; and these recep- 
i68 



Relaxation 

tlve hours, when he gave himself 
into the keeping of the spirit, were 
the most fertile periods of his life ; 
they enriched and inspired him for 
the hours of work. 



169 



Chapter XVIII 

Recreation 

THERE is a radical difference 
between relaxation and recre- 
ation. To relax is to unbend the 
bow, to diminish the tension, to lie 
fallow, to open the nature on all 
sides. Relaxation involves passivity; 
it is a negative condition so far as 
activity is concerned, although it is 
often a positive condition so far as 
growth is concerned. Recreation, on 
the other hand, involves activity, but 
activity along other lines than those 
of work. Froebel first clearly devel- 
oped the educational significance and 
uses of play. Earlier thinkers and 
writers on education had seen that 
170 



Recreation 

play is an important element in the 
unfolding of a child's nature, but 
Froebel discerned the psychology of 
play and showed how it maybe utilised 
for educational purposes. His com- 
ments on this subject are full of 
significance : " The plays of the child 
contain the germ of the whole life 
that is to follow ; for the man devel- 
ops and manifests himself in play, 
and reveals the noblest aptitudes and 
the deepest elements of his being. 
. . . The plays of childhood are the 
germinal leaves of all later life ; for 
the whole man is developed and 
shown in these, in his tenderest dis- 
positions, in his innermost tenden- 
cies." And one of FroebeFs most 
intimate associates suggests another 
service of play, when he says : "It is 
like a fresh bath for the human soul 
when we dare to be children again 
171 



Work and Culture 

with children." Play is the prelude 
to work, and stands in closest relation 
to it ; it is the natural expression of 
the child's energy, as work is the nat- 
ural expression of the man's energy. 
In play and through play the child 
develops the power that is in him, 
comes to knowledge of himself, and 
realises his relation with other chil- 
dren and with the world about him. 
In the free and unconscious pouring 
out of his vitality he secures for 
himself training, education, and 
growth. 

The two instincts which impel the 
child to play are the craving for activ- 
ity and the craving for joy. In a 
healthy child the vital energy rushes 
out with a fountain-like impetuosity 
and force ; he does not take thought 
about what he shall do, for it is of 
very little consequence what he does 
172 



Recreation 

so long as he is in motion. A boy, 
with the high spirits of perfect health, 
is, at times, an irresponsible force. 
He acts instinctively, not intelli- 
gently ; and he acts under the pres- 
sure of a tremendous vitality, not as 
the result of design or conviction. 
The education of play is the more deep 
and fundamental because it is received 
in entire unconsciousness ; like the 
landscape which sank into the soul 
of the boy blowing mimic hootings 
to the owls on the shore of Winander. 
The boy who has the supreme good 
fortune of physical, mental, and moral 
health often passes the invisible line 
between play and work without con- 
sciousness of the critical transition. 
In the life of a man so harmonious 
in nature and so fortunate in condi- 
tion, work is a normal evolution of 
play; and the qualities which make 
173 



Work and Culture 

play educational and vital give work 
its tone and temper. Activity and 
joy are not dissevered in such a nor- 
mal unfolding of a man's life. 

Now, play is as much a need of 
the man*s nature as of the boy's, and 
if work is to keep its freshness of 
interest, its spontaneity, and its pro- 
ductiveness, it must retain the charac- 
teristics of play ; it must have variety, 
unconsciousness of self, joy. Activ- 
ity it cannot lose, but joy too often 
goes out of it. The fatal tendency 
to deadness, born of routine and 
repetition, overtakes the worker long 
before his force is spent, and blights 
his work by sapping its vitality. 
Real work always sinks its roots 
deep in a man's nature, and derives 
its life from the life of the man ; 
when the vitality of the worker be- 
gins to subside, through fatigue, ex- 
174 



Recreation 

haustion of impulse, or loss of interest, 
the work ceases to be original, vital, 
and genuine. Whatever impairs the 
worker's vitality impairs his work. 
So close is the relation between the 
life of the artist and the life of his 
art that the stages of his decline are 
clearly marked in the record of his 
work. It is of the highest impor- 
tance, therefore, that a man keep 
himself in the most highly vitalised 
condition for the sake of productive- 
ness. 

No one can keep in this condition 
without the rest which comes from 
self-forgetfulness and the refreshment 
which comes from joy ; one can never 
lose the capacity for play without some 
sacrifice of the capacity for work. 
The man who never plays may not 
show any loss of energy, but he in- 
evitably shows loss of power ; he may 
175 



Work and Culture 

continue to do a certain work with a 
certain efficiency, but he cannot give 
it breadth, freshness, spiritual signifi- 
cance. To give one's work these 
qualities one must withdraw from it 
at frequent intervals, and suffer the 
energies to play in other directions ; 
one must not only diminish the ten- 
sion and lessen the concentration of 
attention; one must go further and 
seek other objects of interest and 
other kinds of activity ; and these ob- 
jects and activities must be sought and 
pursued freely, joyfully, and in forget- 
fulness of self The old delight of 
the playground must be called back 
by the man, and must be at the com- 
mand of the man. The boy's play, 
in a real sense, creates the man ; the 
man's play re-creates him by re-vital- 
ising him, refreshing him and restor- 
ing to him that delight in activity for 
176 



Recreation 

its own sake which is the evidence 
of fresh impulse. 

This is the true meaning of recrea- 
tion ; it involves that spiritual recu- 
peration and reinforcement which 
restore a man his original energy of 
impulse and action. Recreation is, 
therefore, not a luxury, but a neces- 
sity ; not an indulgence, but a duty. 
When a man is out of health physi- 
cally and neglects to take the precau- 
tions or remedies which his condition 
demands, he becomes, if he has intelli- 
gence, a suicide ; for he deliberately 
throws his life away. In like man- 
ner, the man who destroys his fresh- 
ness and force by making himself a 
slave to work and so transforming 
what ought to be a joy into a task, 
commits a grave offence against him- 
self and society. The highest pro- 
ductivity will never be secured until 
12 177 



Work and Culture 

the duty of recreation is set on the 
same plane with that of work, and 
the obligation to nourish one's life 
made as binding as the obligation to 
spend one's life. 

How a man shall secure recreation 
and in what form he shall take it 
depends largely upon individual 
conditions. Mr. Gladstone found 
recreation not only in tree-cutting 
but in Homeric studies ; Lord Salis- 
bury finds it in chemistry ; Washing- 
ton found it in hunting ; Wordsworth 
in walking; Carlyle in talking and 
smoking; Mr. Balfour finds it in 
golf, and Mr. Cleveland in fishing. 
Any pursuit or occupation which 
takes a man out of the atmosphere 
of his work-room and away from 
his work, gives him different in- 
terests, calls into activity different 
muscles or faculties, brings back the 
178 



Recreation 

spirit of play, recalls the spontaneous 
and joyous mood, and re-creates 
through diversion, variety, and the 
appeal to another side of the nature. 
To work long and with cumulative 
power, one must play often and hon- 
estly ; that is to say, one must play 
for the pure joy of it. 



179 



Chapter XIX 

Ease of Mood 

EASE, it has been said, is the 
result of forgotten toil ; and 
ease is essential to the man who 
works continuously and on a large 
scale. It is fortunate, rather than the 
reverse, when one's work is not easily 
done at the start ; for early facility is 
often fatal to real proficiency. The 
man who does his work without 
effort at the beginning is tempted to 
evade the training and discipline 
which bring ease to the mind and 
the hand because both have learned 
the secret of the particular work and 
mastered the art of doing it with force 
and freedom. Facility is mere agility ; 
1 80 



Ease of Mood 

ease comes from the perfect adjust- 
ment of the man to his tools, his 
materials, and his task. The facile 
man, as a rule, does his work with as 
little effort at twenty as at fifty ; the 
man of trained skill does his work 
with increasing comfort and power.. 
The first starts more readily ; the 
second has the greater faculty of 
growth, and is more likely to become 
an artist in the end. 

It is significant that the most orig- 
inal and capacious minds, like the 
most powerful bodies, often betray 
noticeable awkwardness at the start ; 
they need prolonged exercise in order 
to secure freedom of movement ; they 
must have time for growth. Minds 
of a certain superficial brilliancy, on 
the other hand, often mature early 
because they have so little depth and 
range. To be awkward in taking 
i8i 



Work and Culture 

hold of one*s work is not, therefore, 
a thing to be regretted ; as a rule, it 
is a piece of good fortune. 

But awkwardness must finally give 
place to ease if one is to do many 
things or great things, and do them 
well. Balzac wrote many stories be- 
fore he secured harmony and force 
of style ; but if, as the result of his 
long apprenticeship, he had failed to 
secure these qualities, the creation of 
the "Comedie Humaine" would have 
been beyond his power. The work 
was so vast that no man could have 
accomplished it who had not learned 
to work rapidly and easily. For ease, 
when it is the result of toil, evidences 
the harmonious action of the whole 
nature ; it indicates that mastery 
which comes to those only who see 
all the possibilities of the material in 
hand and readily put all their power 
182 



Ease of Mood 

into the shaping of it. A great work 
of art conveys an impression, not of 
effort, but of force and resource. 
One is convinced that Shakespeare 
could have written plays and Rem- 
brandt painted portraits through an 
indefinite period of time without strain 
or exhaustion. 

Strain and exhaustion are fatal to 
fine quality of work, — exhaustion, be- 
cause it deprives work of vitality ; 
and strain, because it robs work of 
repose, harmony, and charm. It is 
interesting to note how deeply an 
audience enjoys ease in a speaker; 
when he seems to be entirely at home 
and to have complete command of 
his resources, his hearers throw off all 
apprehension, all fear that their sym- 
pathies may be drawn upon, and give 
themselves up to the charm of beau- 
tiful or compelHng speech. Let a 
183 



Work and Culture 

speaker show embarrassment or anx- 
iety, on the other hand, and his 
hearers instantly share his anxiety. 
There are speakers, moreover, who 
give no occasion for any concern 
about their ability to deal with a sub- 
ject or an occasion, but whose exertion 
is so evident that the audience, which 
is always sensitive to the psychologic 
condition of a speaker, is wearied and 
sometimes exhausted. It is one of 
the characteristics of art that it con- 
ceals all trace of toil ; and a man's 
work never takes on the highest 
qualities until all evidences of labour 
and exertion are effaced from it. 

Not many months ago the mem- 
bers of a court of very high standing 
expressed great pleasure in the pros- 
pect of hearing a certain lawyer of 
eminence on the following morning. 
These judges were elderly men, who 
184 



Ease of Mood 

had listened patiently through long 
years to arguments of all kinds, pre- 
sented with all degrees of skill. They 
had doubtless traversed the whole 
field of jurisprudence many times, and 
could hardly anticipate any surprises 
of thought or novelties of argument. 
And yet these patient and long-suf- 
fering jurists were looking forward 
with delight to the opportunity of 
hearing another argument on an 
abstruse question of legal construc- 
tion ! The explanation of their inter- 
est was not far to seek. The jurist 
whose appearance before them was 
anticipated with so much pleasure is 
notable in his profession for ease of 
manner, which is in itself a very great 
charm. This ease invests his discus- 
sions of abstract or obscure questions 
with a grace and finish which are 
within the command of the artist 
i8s 



Work and Culture 

only ; and the artist is always fresh, 
delightful, and captivating. 

Mr. Gladstone's friends recall as 
one of his captivating qualities the 
ease with which he seemed to do his 
work. He was never in haste ; he 
always conveyed the impression of 
having ample time for his varied and 
important tasks. If he had felt the 
spur of haste he would have lost his 
power of winning through that de- 
lightful old-fashioned courtesy which 
none could resist ; if in his talks, his 
books, or his speeches there had been 
evidences of strain, he would not have 
kept to the end an influence which 
was due in no small measure to the 
impression of reserve power which he 
always conveyed. 

Ease of mood is essential to long- 
sustained working-power. The anx- 
ious man loses force, and the laborious 
i86 



Ease of Mood 

man time, which cannot be spared 
from the greater tasks. Wellington 
used to say that a successful com- 
mander must do nothing which he 
could get other men to do ; he must 
delegate all lesser tasks and relieve 
himself of all care of details, in order 
that he might concentrate his full 
force on the matter in hand. It is 
said that the most daring and com- 
pelling men are invariably cool and 
quiet in manner. Such men lose 
nothing by friction or waste of energy ; 
they work with the ease which is born 
of toil. 



187 



Chapter XX 

Sharing the Race-Fortune 

THE development of one's per- 
sonality cannot be accom- 
plished in isolation or solitude ; the 
process involves close and enduring 
association with one's fellows. If 
work were purely a matter of mechan- 
ical skill, each worker might have 
his cell and perform his task, as in 
a prison. But work involves the 
entire personality, and the person- 
ality finds its complete unfolding, not 
in detachment, but in association. 
Talent, says Goethe, thrives in soli- 
tude, but character grows in the 
stream of the world. It is a twofold 
discovery which a man must make 
i88 



Sharing the Race-Fortune 

before the highest kind of success 
lies within his grasp : the discovery 
of his own individual gift, force, or 
aptitude, and the discovery of his 
place in society. If it were possible 
to secure complete development of 
one's power in isolation, the product 
would be, not the full energy of a 
man expressing itself through a con- 
genial activity, but a detached skill 
exercised automatically and apart 
from a personaHty. 

In order to stand erect on his feet, 
in true and fruitful relations with the 
world about him, a man must join 
hands with his fellows. For a very 
large part of his education must come 
from his contact with the race. Since 
men began to live and to learn the 
lessons of life, each generation has 
added something to that vital knowl- 
edge of the art of living which is the 
189 



Work and Culture 

very soul of culture, and something 
to the constructive and positive prod- 
uct of this vital knowledge wrought 
out into institutions, organisations, 
science, art, and religion. This 
inheritance of culture and achieve- 
ment is the richest possession into 
which the individual member of the 
race is born, and he cannot take 
possession of his share of the race- 
fortune unless he becomes one of the 
race family. This race-fortune is 
the product of the colossal work of 
the race through its entire history; it 
represents the slow and painful toil 
and saving of countless multitudes of 
men and women. It is a wealth be- 
side which all purely monetary forms 
of riches are fleeting and secondary ; 
it is the enduring spiritual endowment 
of the race secured by the incalcula- 
ble toil of all past generations. 
190 



Sharing the Race-Fortune 

Now, no man can secure his share 
in this race-fortune until he joins the 
ranks of the workers and takes his 
place in the field, the shop, the 
factory, the study, or the atelier. 
The idle man is always a detached 
man, and is, therefore, excluded from 
the privileges of heirship. To get 
the beauty of any kind of art one 
must train himself to see, to under- 
stand, and to enjoy ; for art is a sealed 
book to the ignorant. To secure 
the largeness of view which comes 
from a knowledge of many cities and 
races, one must travel with a mind 
already prepared by prolonged study. 
The approach to every science is 
guarded by doors which open only to 
the hand which has been made 
strong by patient and persistent exer- 
cise. Every department of knowl- 
edge is barred and locked against 



Work and Culture 

the ignorant; nothing which repre- 
sents achievement, thought, knowl- 
edge, skill, beauty, is within reach of 
the idle. Society has secured nothing 
which endures save as the result of 
persistent and self-denying work ; 
and nothing which it has created can 
be understood, nothing which it has 
accumulated can be appropriated, 
without kindred self-denial and toil. 
It is evident, therefore, that the mate- 
rial for the education of the indi- 
vidual cannot be secured save by 
intimate fellowship with the race. 

This fellowship must rest also in 
present relations ; for while man may 
get much that is of vast importance 
by contact with the working race of 
the past, he cannot get either the 
richest material or put himself under 
the deepest educational process with- 
out making himself one with the 
192 



Sharing the Race-Fortune 

working race of to-day. The race- 
fortune, unlike other fortunes, does 
not increase by its own productive 
powers ; it grows only as it is em- 
ployed by those who inherit it. 
Investments of capital often lose 
their vitality ; they still represent a 
definite sum of money, but they make 
no returns of interest. In like man- 
ner the accumulations of the race be- 
come dead unless they are constantly 
vitalised by effective use. The 
richest material for culture is value- 
less unless it is so employed as 
continually to renew the temper of 
culture in those who possess it. The 
richest results of past toil, genius, and 
life are without significance in the 
hands of the ignorant ; and it has hap- 
pened more than once that the pearls 
of past civilisation have been trampled 
into the mire by the feet of swine. 
'3 193 



Work and Culture 

The architectural remains of the older 
Rome were ruthlessly destroyed in 
the years before the Renaissance and 
put to menial use as mere building 
material. They had reverted to the 
condition and value of crude stone, 
because no one perceived their higher 
values. 

There is, unfortunately, another 
kind of ignorance, not quite so dense 
as that which does not recognise 
beauty of form or value of historical 
association, but not less destructive ; 
there is that ignorance of the spiritual 
force behind the form which makes 
a fetich of the form, and so misses the 
interior wealth which it contains. 
There has spread among men and 
women of the dilettante temper the 
belief that to know the results and 
products of the past simply as curios 
and relics is to share the culture 
194 



Sharing the Race-Fortune 

which these things of beauty and 
skill embody and preserve ; and this 
false idea has helped to spread abroad 
the feeling that culture is accom- 
plishment rather than force, and that 
it is for the idle rather than for the 
active and creative. There never was 
a more radical misconception of a 
fundamental process, for culture in 
the true sense involves, as a process, 
the highest and truest development 
of a race, and, as a product, the 
most enduring spiritual expression 
of race genius and experience. The 
culture of the Greeks was the highest 
form of their vital force ; and the 
product of that culture was not 
only their imperishable art, but their 
political, social, and religious organisa- 
tion and ideals. Their deepest life 
went into their culture, and the most 
enduring fruits of that culture are 
195 



Work and Culture 

also the most significant expressions 
of their life. 

To get at the sources of power in 
Shakespeare's plays, one must not 
only understand the secrets of their 
structure as works of art, but one 
must also discern their value as human 
documents ; one must pass through 
them into the passion, the suffering, 
the toil of the race. No one can get 
to the heart of those plays without 
getting very near to the heart of his 
race ; and no one can secure the 
fruits of culture from their study 
until he has come to see, with 
Shakespeare, that the unrecorded life- 
experience of the race is more beauti- 
ful, more tragic, and more absorbing 
than all the transcriptions of that 
experience made by men of genius. 
In other words, the ultimate result 
of a true study of Shakespeare is 
196 



Sharing the Race-Fortune 

such an opening of the mind and 
such a quickening of the imagination 
that the student sees on all sides, in 
the lives of those about him, the 
stuff of which the drama is made. 
Not to the idle, but to the workers, 
does Shakespeare reveal himself 



197 



Chapter XXI 

The Imagination in Work 

THE uses of the imagination are 
so little understood by the 
great majority of men, both trained 
and untrained, that it is practically 
ignored not only in the conduct of 
life, but of education. It receives 
some incidental development as a 
result of educational processes, but 
the effort to reach and affect it as the 
faculties of observation, of reasoning, 
and of memory are made specific 
objects of training and unfolding, is 
rarely made. It is relegated to the 
service of the poets and painters if it 
is recognised at all ; and so far as 
they are concerned it is assumed that 
198 



The Imagination in Work 

they will find their own way of edu- 
cating this elusive faculty. As for 
other men, dealing with life from the 
executive or practical sides, it is taken 
for granted that if they have imagina- 
tion they can find no proper use for 
it. Individual teachers have often 
understood the place and function of 
the imagination, and have sought to 
liberate and enrich it by intelligently- 
planned study; but the schools of 
most, if not of all, times have treated 
it as a wayward and disorderly gift, 
not amenable to discipline and train- 
ing, and of very doubtful value. 
There has always been, in every 
highly civilised society, a good deal 
that has appealed to this divinest of 
all the gifts with which men have 
been endowed ; there have been 
periods in which the imagination has 
been stirred to its depths by the force 
199 



Work and Culture 

of human energy and the play and 
splendour of human experience and 
achievement ; but there has never yet 
been adequate recognition of its place 
in the life of the individual and of 
society, nor intelligent provision for 
its education. The movements of 
thought along educational lines in 
recent years show, however, a slow 
but steady drift toward a clearer con- 
ception of what the imagination may 
do for men, and of what education 
may do for the imagination. 

So long as the uses of the imagina- 
tion in creative work are so little 
comprehended by the great majority 
of men, it can hardly be expected that 
its practical uses will be understood. 
There is a general if somewhat vague 
recognition of the force and beauty of 
its achievements as illustrated in the 
work of Dante, Raphael, Rembrandt, 



The Imagination in Work 

and Wagner ; but very few people 
perceive the play of this supreme 
architectural and structural faculty in 
the great works of engineering, or in 
the sublime guesses at truth which 
science sometimes makes when she 
comes to the end of the solid road of 
fact along which she has travelled. 
The scientist, the engineer, the con- 
structive man in every department of 
work, use the imagination quite as 
much as the artist ; for the imagina- 
tion is not a decorator and embel- 
lisher, as so many appear to think ; 
it is a creator and constructor. 
Wherever work is done on great 
lines or life is lived in fields of 
constant fertility, the imagination is 
always the central and shaping power. 
Burke lifted statesmanship to a lofty 
plane by the use of it ; Edison, Tesla, 
and Roebling in their various ways 



Work and Culture 

have shown its magical quality ; and 
more than one man of fortune owes 
his success more to his imagination 
than to that practical sagacity which 
is commonly supposed to be the 
conjurer which turns all baser metals 
into gold. 

That splendour of the spirit which 
shines in the great art of the world 
shines also in all lesser work that is 
genuine and sincere ; for the higher 
genius of man, which is the heritage 
of all who make themselves ready to 
receive it, is present in all places 
where honest men work, and moulds 
all materials which honest men handle. 
Indeed the most convincing evidence 
of the activity of this supreme faculty 
is to be found, not in the works of 
men of exceptional gift, but in the 
work of the obscure and undistin- 
guished. It is impossible to energise 

202 



The Imagination in Work 

the imagination among the workers 
without energising it among the art- 
ists ; and artists never appear in great 
numbers unless there is in the com- 
mon work of common men a touch 
of vitality and freshness. A real 
movement of the imagination is 
never confined to a class ; it is always 
shared by the community. It does 
not come in like a group of unrelated 
rivulets fed by separate fountains ; it 
comes like a tide, slowly or swiftly 
rising until it enfolds a wide reach of 
territory. The presence of a true art 
spirit shows itself not so conclusively 
in a few noble works as in the touch 
of originality and beauty on common 
articles in common use ; on furniture, 
and domestic pottery, and in the love 
of flowers. 

The genius of a race works from 
below upward, as the seed sends its 
203 



Work and Culture 

shoot out of the hidden place where 
it is buried ; and when it becomes 
luminous in books, painting, and 
architecture, it grows also in out-of- 
the-way places and in things of 
humble use. The instinct for beauty, 
which is more pronounced and fruit- 
ful among the Japanese than among 
any other modern people, shows itself 
most convincingly in the originality, 
variety, and charm of the shapes 
which household pottery takes on, 
and in the quiet but deep enjoyment 
of the blossoming apple or cherry, 
the blooming vine or the fragrant 
rose. It is the presence of beauty 
diffused through the life of a people 
in habit, taste, pleasure, and daily use 
which makes the concentration of 
beauty in great and enduring works 
not only possible but inevitable ; for 
if a people really care for beauty they 
204 



The Imagination in Work 

will never lack artists to give endur- 
ing expression to that craving which, 
among men of lesser gift, shows itself 
in a constant endeavour to bring 
material surroundings into harmony 
with spiritual aspirations. 

This play of the imagination over 
the whole landscape of life gives it 
perennial charm, because it perpetu- 
ally re-forms and re-arranges it ; and 
the free movement of the imagination 
in all occupations and tasks not only 
makes work a delight, but gives it 
a significance and adequacy, which 
make it the fit expression, not of a 
mere skill, but of an irr\mortal spirit. 
The work from which this quality is 
absent may be honest and sincere, but 
it cannot be liberalising, joyful, and 
contagious ; it cannot give the nature 
free play ; it cannot express the man. 
Patience, persistence, fidelity are fun- 
205 



Work and Culture 

damental but not creative qualities ; 
the true worker must possess and 
practise them ; but he must go far 
beyond them if he is to put himself 
into his work, and bring his work into 
harmony with those spiritual condi- 
tions and aims which are the invisible 
but final standards and patterns of all 
works and tasks. 

One may always get out of hard 
work the satisfaction which comes 
from the consciousness of an honest 
endeavour to do an honest piece of 
work ; but the work which inspires 
rather than exhausts, and the doing 
of which gives the hand more free- 
dom and power for the next task, 
must be penetrated, suffused, and 
shaped by the imagination. The 
great lawyer, physician, electrician, 
teacher, and builder must give his 
work largeness, completeness, and 
206 



The Imagination in Work 

nobility of structure by the use of 
the imagination in as real and true 
a sense as the great poet or painter. 
Without it all work is hard, detached, 
mechanical ; with it all work is vital, 
co-ordinated, original. It must shape, 
illumine, and adorn ; it must build 
the house, light the lamp within its 
walls, and impart to it that touch of 
beauty which invests wood and stone 
with the lightness, the grace, and the 
loveliness of spirit itself. We begin 
with the imagination ; it holds its 
light over the play of childhood ; it is 
the master of the revels, the enchant- 
ments, and the dreams of youth ; it 
must be also the inspiration of all toil 
and the shaping genius of all work. 



207 



Chapter XXII 

The Play of the Imagination 

IT is interesting to study the per- 
sonality of a man whose work 
is invested with freshness, charm, and 
individuality, because such a study 
invariably makes us aware of that 
subtle and elusive skill in the use of 
all materials which is not technical 
but vital. That skill is impossible 
without special training, but it is not 
the product of training; it is not 
dexterity ; it is not facility ; it has 
the ease and grace of a harmonious 
expression of all that is distinctive 
and original in the man. No one 
thinks of technical skill in that mo- 
ment of revelation which comes when 
208 



The Play of the Imagination 

one stands for the first time in the 
presence of a noble work ; later one 
may study at length and with de- 
light the perfection of workmanship 
disclosed in solidity of structure and 
in harmony of detail ; but in the 
moment of revelation it is the essen- 
tial and interior truth and beauty, 
which shine from form and colour and 
texture as the soul shines in a human 
face, which evoke a thrill of recogni- 
tion in us. 

Now, this higher skill which dom- 
inates and subordinates the technical 
skill, this skill of the spirit which 
commands and uses the skill of the 
body, is born in the soul of the 
worker and is the ultimate evidence 
and fruit of his mastership. It is 
conditioned on the free play of the 
imagination through all the material 
which the worker uses. It involves 
14 209 



Work and Culture 

that fusion of knowledge, intelligence, 
facility, and insight which can be ef- 
fected only by the constant use of 
the imagination. In statesmanship 
Burke and Webster are examples of 
this highest type of worker; men 
who not only command the facts 
with which they are called upon to 
deal, but who so organise and vitalise 
those facts that, in their final presen- 
tation, they possess the force of irre- 
sistible argument, and are illumined 
and clothed with perennial beauty as 
works of art. In like manner, in the 
pulpit, Chrysostom, Fenelon, New- 
man, and Brooks not only set reli- 
gious truth in impressive order, but 
gave it the appealing power of a noble 
and enduring beauty. 

It is impossible to do a great piece 
of work unless one can form an 
image of it in advance, unless one 

2IO 



The Play of the Imagination 

can see it as it will finally appear. 
If one were limited in vision to the 
detail actually in hand, the whole 
would never be completed ; that 
which makes the perfection of the 
whole possible is the ability of the 
worker to keep that whole before 
him while he deals with the detached 
parts. Without that power the 
worker is a mechanical drudge, whose 
work has no quality save that of 
dogged fidelity to the task. Now, 
this power of keeping the whole 
before the mind while dealing with 
the parts, of seeing the completed 
machine while shaping a pin or a cog, 
of getting the complete effect of the 
argument while elaborating a minor 
point, resides in the imagination. It 
is the light which must shine upon 
all toil that has in it intelligence, pre- 
vision, and freshness ; and its glow is 

211 



Work and Culture 

as essential in mechanical as in purely 
artistic work. Whenever, in any- 
kind of work dealing with any kind 
of material, there is any constructive 
quality, any fitting of part with part, 
any adjustment of means to ends, 
there must be imagination. 

Work which is done without im- 
agination is so rudimentary that, at 
the best, its highest use is to save 
some one else a little drudgery. 
This elementary kind of work is 
often done by those students of liter- 
ature who confuse the study of gram- 
matical construction with style, and 
those students of the Bible who think 
they are illustrating the truths of 
religion by purely textual study. 
Theology has suffered many things 
at the hands of those who have at- 
tempted to explain the divine mys- 
teries without the light which alone 

212 



The Play of the Imagination 

penetrates these mysteries. To do 
the commonest work with sincerity 
and force ; to understand the simplest 
character; to perform the simplest 
services of friendship ; to enter into 
another's trial and to give the balm 
of sympathy to one who is smit- 
ten and bruised ; to conduct a cam- 
paign by foreseeing the movements 
of an adversary, or to carry on 
successfully a great enterprise by fore- 
casting its probable development ; to 
make any invention or discovery ; to 
be a really great preacher, physician, 
lawyer, teacher, mechanic ; — to do 
any of these things one must have 
and one must use the imagination. 
The charm with which the imagi- 
nation invests childhood is due to 
its habitual and unconscious use by 
children, and is suggestive of the 
methods by which this faculty may 
213 



Work and Culture 

be made the inspirer of all tasks and 
toil. The child makes vivid images 
of the ideas which appeal to it; it 
gives reality to those ideas by identi- 
fying them with the objective world ; 
it clothes all things with which it 
plays with life. In his autobiography 
Goethe describes the door in the wall 
of a certain garden in Frankfort with- 
in which many marvellous things 
happened ; a true romance of inci- 
dent and adventure which became as 
real to the romancer as to his eager 
and credulous listeners. De Quin- 
cey created an imaginary kingdom, 
peopled with imaginary beings whom 
he ruled with benignant wisdom, 
amid universal prosperity and peace, 
until, in an unlucky hour, he ad- 
mitted his brother into a partnership 
of authority ; and that brother, un- 
able to withstand the temptation of 
214 



The Play of the Imagination 

absolute power, became a remorseless 
tyrant. And De Quincey feelingly 
describes the reality of his anguish 
when, to protect his innocent sub- 
jects from a tyrant's rapacity, he was 
compelled to destroy his imaginary 
kingdom. The imaginative boy turns 
a vacant lot into an African jungle, 
and hunts wild beasts in constant 
peril of his life ; the imaginative girl 
carries on social intercourse with her 
dolls as seriously as with her most 
intimate playmates. Everything is 
real and alive to a child, and the 
world of ideas has as much substance 
as the world of matter. 

These characteristics of a child in 
its play throw clear light on the true 
methods of the man in his work ; for 
the play of childhood is prophetic of 
the work of maturity ; it is the pre- 
lude in which all the great motives 

215 



Work and Culture 

are distinctly audible. The man who 
gives his work completeness and 
charm must conceive of that work, 
not as a detached and isolated activity, 
but as part of the great order of life ; 
a product of the vital forces as truly 
as the flower which has its roots in 
the earth. To the growth of the 
flower everything contributes ; it is 
not limited to the tiny plot in which 
it is planted : the vast chemistry of 
nature in soil, atmosphere, and sky 
nourish it. In like manner a man 
must habitually think of his work, 
not as a mere putting forth of 
his technical skill, but as the vital 
product of all the forces which sustain 
him. A real poem grows out of all 
that is deepest in a man's nature ; to 
its making in spiritual conception, 
structure, form, and style his body, 
his mind, and his soul contribute ; 
216 



The Play of the Imagination 

its metre adjusting itself to his 
breathing, its ideas taking direction 
and significance from his thought, 
and its elusive suggestiveness and 
beauty conveying something of his 
mysterious personality. A true ser- 
mon is never what is sometimes called 
a pulpit effort ; it is always the prod- 
uct of the preacher's experience ; he 
does not and cannot make it ; it must 
grow within him. A great oration 
has the same vital relationship with 
the orator, the occasion, the theme, 
and human experience. It is never 
a bit of detached brilliancy ; it is 
always, like Lincoln's address at 
Gettysburg, the summing up ''and 
expression of a vast and deep move- 
ment of the human spirit. In its 
form it reveals the man who makes 
it ; in its content it is seen to be in- 
evitable. It lies in the consciousness 
217 



Work and Culture 

of a race before it rises into the con- 
sciousness of the orator and takes 
flight on the wings of immortal 
speech. 

To think habitually of one's work 
as a growth and not a thing made out 
of hand, as a product of all the 
forces of one's nature and not a bit 
of skill, as alive in the sense in 
which all things are alive in which 
spirit and life express themselves, — 
to conceive of one's work in this large 
and vital way is to keep the imagina- 
tion playing through and inspiring 
it. 



2T8 



Chapter XXIII 

Character 

SUPERIORITY of any kind 
involves discipline, self-denial, 
and self-sacrifice. It is the law of 
excellence that he who would secure 
it must pay for it. In this way the 
intellectual process is bound up with 
the moral process, and a man must 
give his character firmness and fibre 
before he can make his talent effec- 
tive or his genius fruitful. The 
way of the most gifted workman is 
no easier than that of the most 
mediocre ; he learns his lesson more 
easily, but he must learn the same 
lesson. The familiar story of the 
Sleeping Princess protected by a 
hedge of thorns, told in so many 
219 



Work and Culture 

languages, Is a parable of all success 
of a high order. The highest prizes 
are always guarded from the facile 
hand ; they exact patience, persist- 
ence, intelligence, and force. If they 
were easily secured they would be 
easily misused ; it rarely happens, 
however, that a man of high artistic 
gifts degrades his talent. He may 
set it to unprofitable uses, but he 
rarely makes merchandise of it. A 
Rembrandt, Thackeray, or Lowell 
cannot do inferior work for personal 
ends without suffering that devouring 
remorse which accompanies the con- 
science of the artist, and turns all 
ignoble popular successes into mock- 
eries and scourges. 

Moral education precedes master- 
ship in every art, because the training 
which mastery involves reacts upon 
character and gives it steadiness and 

220 



Character 

solidity. Great writers have some- 
times lived careless, irresponsible 
lives, but they have always paid a 
great price for self-indulgence. The 
work of an irresponsible man of 
genius always suggests the loss which 
society has suffered by reason of his 
moral instability. Such men have 
done charming work ; they have 
touched their creations with the 
magic of natural grace and the beauty 
of fresh and rich feeling ; but they 
miss that completeness and finality 
which carry with them the conviction 
that the man has put forth all that 
was in him. We value what they 
have done, but we are always asking 
whether they could not have done 
more. Genius is of so rare and vital 
a nature that it will flash through all 
manner of obscurations, but there is 
a vast difference between the light 

221 



Work and Culture 

which shines through a clear medium 
and that which is dimmed and re- 
flected by a murky atmosphere. A 
man of Chatterton's temperament will 
give evidence of the possession of 
genius, but how far removed he is, in 
influence, position, and power, from a 
Tennyson or a Wordsworth ! 

The connection between sane living 
and sound work is a physiological 
and psychological necessity. The 
time, strength, poise, capacity for 
sustained work, steadiness of will, 
involved in the successful perform- 
ance of great tasks or the production 
of great artistic creations exclude from 
the race all save those who bring to 
it health, vigour, and energy. It is 
unnecessary to inquire with regard to 
the habits of the man who builds up 
a great business enterprise or who 
secures genuine financial reputation 



Character 

and authority ; these achievements 
always involve self-control, courage, 
persistence, and moral vigour. They 
are beyond the reach of the self- 
indulgent man. The man whose 
weakness of will makes him the victim 
of appetite or passion may make bril- 
liant efforts, but he is incapable of 
sustained effort ; he may do beautiful 
things from time to time, he cannot 
do beautiful things continuously and 
on a large scale. A Villon may give 
the world a few songs of notable 
sweetness or power ; he cannot give 
the world a Divine Comedy or the 
plays of Corneille. 

Every attempt to dissever art from 
character, however brilliantly sus- 
tained, is doomed to failure because 
the instinct, the intelligence, and the 
experience of the race are against it. 
Physiology and psychology are as 
223 



Work and Culture 

definite as religion in their declara- 
tions on this matter ; it is not a ques- 
tion of dogma or even of faith ; it is 
a question of elementary laws and of 
common sense. All modern investi- 
gation goes to show the subtle and 
vital relations which exist between 
the different parts of a man's nature, 
and the certainty of the reaction of 
one part upon another ; so that what- 
ever touches the body ultimately 
touches the innermost nature of the 
man, and whatever affects the spirit 
eventually leaves its record on the 
physique. Every piece of genuine 
work which comes from a man's hand 
bears the impress of and is stamped 
with the quality of his whole being ; 
it is the complex product of all that 
the man is and of all that he has 
done ; it is the result of his genius, 
his industry, and his character. 
224 



Character 

Goethe saw clearly, as every critic 
of insight must see, that the artist is 
conditioned on the man ; that when- 
ever a man does anything which has 
greatness in it he does it with his 
whole nature. Into his verse the poet 
puts his body, his mind, and his soul ; 
he is as powerless to detach his work 
from his past as he is to detach him- 
self from it ; and one of the saddest 
penalties of his misdoings is their 
survival in his work. The dul- 
ness of the poet's ear shows itself in 
the defective melody of his verse ; for 
both metre and rhythm have a physi- 
ological basis ; they represent and ex- 
press the harmony which is in the 
body when the body is finely attuned 
to the spirit. Dull senses and a 
sluggish body are never found in 
connection with a great command of 
the melodic quality in language. 
iS 225 



Work and Culture 

Goethe, with his deep insight, held 
so uncompromisingly to the unity of 
man and his works, that he would 
not have tried to escape the crit- 
icism of his nature which his works, 
adequately interpreted, suggest. He 
would have expected to find his 
moral limitations reproduced in his 
art. He indicated the fundamental 
principle when he said that his works, 
taken together, constituted one great 
confession. And this may be affirmed 
of every man's work ; it is inevitably, 
and by the law of his nature, a dis- 
closure of what he is, and what he is 
depends largely upon what he has 
been. Men have nowhere more 
conspicuously failed to escape them- 
selves than in their works. Literary 
history, especially, is a practically un- 
used treasure-house of moral illustra- 
tion and teaching ; for in no other 
226 



Character 

record of human activity is the de- 
pendence of a man's work on his 
nature more constantly and strikingly 
brought out. The subtle relation 
between temperament, genius, en- 
vironment, and character is in con- 
stant evidence to the student of 
literature ; and he learns at last the 
primary truth that because a man's 
work is a revelation of the man, it is, 
therefore, as much a matter of his 
character as of his genius. 

The order of the world is moral 
in every fibre ; men may do what 
they please within certain limits, and 
because they do what they please 
society seems to be in a state of moral 
chaos ; but every word and deed 
reacts instantly on the man, and this 
reaction is so inevitable that since 
time began not one violator of any 
law of life has ever escaped the 
227 



Work and Culture 

penalty. He has paid the price of 
his word or his deed on the instant 
in its reaction upon his character. 
God does not punish men ; they 
punish themselves in their own 
natures and in the work of their 
hands. When Mirabeau, in the con- 
sciousness of the possession of the 
most masterful genius of his time, 
rose to speak in the States General, 
he became aware that his dissolute 
past was standing beside him and 
mocking him. His vast power, hon- 
estly put forth for great ends, was 
neutralised by a record which made 
belief in him almost impossible. In 
bitterness of soul he learned that 
genius and character are bound 
together by indissoluble ties, and 
that genius without character is like 
oil that blazes up and dies down 
about a shattered lamp. More than 
228 



Character 

once, in words full of the deepest 
pathos, he recognised the immense 
value of character in men of far less 
ability than himself The words which 
Mrs. Ward puts into the mouth 
of Henri Regnault are memorable 
as embodying searching criticism: 
" No, we don't lack brains, we French. 
All the same, I tell you, in the whole 
of that room there are about half-a- 
dozen people, — oh, not so many ! — • 
not nearly so many ! — who will ever 
make a mark, even for their own gen- 
eration, who will ever strike anything 
out of nature that is worth having — 
wrestle with her to any purpose. 
Why ? Because they have every 
sort of capacity — every sort of 
cleverness — and no character I ^^ 

If a man is insensibly determining 
the quality of his work by everything 
which he is doing ; if he is fixing 
229 



Work and Culture 

the excellence of its workmanship by 
the standards he is accepting and the 
habits he is forming ; if he is creating 
in advance its spiritual content and 
significance by the quality which his 
own nature is unconsciously taking 
on ; and if he is determining its 
quantity and force by the strength, 
persistence, and steadfastness which 
he is developing, it is clear that 
work rests ultimately upon character, 
and that character conditions work 
in quality, content, skill, and mass. 



230 



Chapter XXIV 

Freedom from Self-Consciousness 

THE sublime paradox of the 
spiritual life is repeated in all 
true development of personal gift and 
power. In order to find his life a man 
must first lose it ; in order to keep his 
soul a man must first give it. The 
beginning of all education is self-con- 
scious ; at the start every effect must 
be calculated, every skill, method, or 
dexterity carefully studied. Training 
involves a rigid account of oneself 
based on searching self-knowledge. 
To become an effective speaker one 
must know his defects of bearing, 
gesture, voice ; one must bring his 
whole personality into clear light, and 
231 



Work and Culture 

study it as if it were an external 
thing; one must become intensely 
self-conscious. The initiation to 
every art is through this door of 
rigid scrutiny of self, and entire sur- 
render of self to the discipline of 
minute study and exacting practice. 
The pianist knows the artistic value 
of every note, and strikes each note 
with carefully calculated effect. The 
artist gives himself up to a patient 
study of details, and is content with 
the monotony of laborious imitation ; 
subjecting every element of material 
and manner to the most thorough 
analysis. 

The first stage in the education of 
the true worker is self-conscious ; the 
final stage is self-forgetful. No man 
can enter the final stage without pass- 
ing through the initial stage; no 
man can enter the final stage without 
232 



Freedom from Self-Consciousness 

leaving the initial stage behind him. 
One must first develop intense self- 
consciousness, and then one must be 
able to forget and obliterate himself. 
One must first accept the most exact- 
ing discipline of the school, and then 
one must forget that schools exist. 
The apprentice is the servant of 
detail ; the master is the servant of 
the idea: the first accepts methods 
as if they were the finalities of art ; 
the second uses them as mere instru- 
ments. Tennyson's attention was 
once called to certain very subtle 
vowel effects in one of his later 
poems ; he promptly said that he 
had not thought of them. That was 
undoubtedly true, for he had become 
a master; but there was a time, in 
his days of apprenticeship, when he 
had studied the musical qualities and 
resources of words with the most 
233 



Work and Culture 

searching intelligence. The transi- 
tion from apprenticeship to mastery- 
is accomplished when a man passes 
through self-consciousness into self- 
forgetfulness, when his knowledge 
and skill become so much a part of 
himself that they become instinctive. 
When the artist has gained, through 
calculation, study, and practice, com- 
plete command of himself and his 
materials, he subordinates skill to 
insight, and makes his art the uncon- 
scious expression of his deepest na- 
ture. When this stage is reached the 
artist can pour his whole soul into 
his work almost instinctively ; his 
skill and methods have become so 
completely a part of himself that he 
can use them almost without being 
conscious of them. 

This ability to transform skill into 
character, to make instinct do the 
234 



Freedom from Self-Consciousness 

work of intelligence, to pass from in- 
tense self-consciousness into self-for- 
getfulness, is the supreme test to 
which every artist must subject him- 
self; let him sustain this test and his 
place is secure. To find one's life in 
the deepest sense, to bring out and 
express one's personality, a man must 
lose that life ; that is to say, he must 
have the power of entire self-surren- 
der. When the inspiration comes, 
as it does come to all creative spirits, 
a man must be able to surrender 
himself to it completely. When the 
hour of vision arrives the prophet 
has no time or thought to waste on 
himself; if he is to speak, he must 
listen with intense and utter stillness 
of soul. 

In the degree in which a man 
masters his art does he attain uncon- 
sciousness of self. Great artists have 
235 



Work and Culture 

sometimes been great egotists, but 
not in their greatest hours or works. 
And in so far as their egotism has 
touched their art it has invariably 
limited its range or diminished its 
depth and power ; for in those mo- 
ments in which the vision is clearest 
a man is always lifted above himself 
He escapes for the moment the limi- 
tations which ordinarily encircle him 
as the horizon encircles the sea. 

That which is true of the master 
worker, the artist, is true of all lesser 
workers : the highest efficiency is 
conditioned on the ability to forget 
oneself. Self-consciousness is the 
most serious and painful limitation 
of many men and women of genuine 
capacity and power. It rests like a 
heavy load on shoulders which ought 
to be free ; it is an impediment of 
speech when speech ought to have 
236 



Freedom from Self-Consciousness 

entire spontaneity, and freedom. 
This intense consciousness of self, 
although always revealing a certain 
amount of egoism, is often devoid of 
egotism ; it is, in many cases, a sign 
of diffidence and essential modesty. 
It is the burden and limitation of 
those especially who have high aims 
and standards, but who distrust their 
own ability to do well the things they 
are eager to do. To be self-conscious 
is to waste a great deal of force which 
ought to go into work ; it is to put 
into introspection the vitality which 
ought to issue in some form of 
expression. The speaker is never in 
full command of his theme or his 
audience until he has gotten rid of 
himself; so long as he has to deal 
with himself he cannot wholly surren- 
der himself to his theme nor to his 
audience. He is hampered, troubled, 
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Work and Culture 

and anxious when he ought to be 
free, calm, and unconcerned. 

There is but one remedy for self- 
consciousness, and that is absorption 
in one*s work. There must first be 
not only thorough preparation for 
the task in hand but thorough training 
of the whole nature ; for every weak 
place in a man's education for his 
work is a point of self-consciousness. 
No man of conscience can do easily 
and instinctively that which he knows 
he cannot do well. The worker 
must have, therefore, the serenity 
which comes from confidence in the 
adequacy of his preparation. A man 
can even fail with a clear conscience, 
if he has taken every precaution 
against the possibility of failure. 
Adequate training being assumed, a 
man must cultivate the habit of self- 
surrender. This is sometimes diifi- 
238 



Freedom from Self-Consciousness 

cult, but it is rarely, if ever, impos- 
sible. 

To take a further illustration from 
the experience of the speaker, who 
is, perhaps, as often as any other 
kind of worker, burdened and limited 
at the start by self-consciousness : it 
is entirely possible to lose conscious- 
ness of self for the time in the theme 
or the occasion. Assuming that the 
preparatory work has been thorough, 
a man can train himself to fasten his 
thought entirely on his subject and 
his opportunity. If his theme is a 
worthy one and he has given adequate 
thought or research to it, he can learn 
to forget himself and his audience in 
complete surrender to it. Compan- 
ionship with truth invests a man with 
a dignity which ought to give him 
poise and serenity ; which will give 
him calmness and effectiveness if he 
239 



Work and Culture 

regards himself as its servant and 
messenger. An ambassador is held 
in great honour because of the power 
which he represents ; a man who is 
dealing in any way with truth or 
beauty has a right to repose in the 
greatness and charm of that for which 
he stands. This transference of in- 
terest from the outcome of a personal 
effort to the sharing of a vision or 
the conveyance of a power has often 
made the stammerer eloquent and 
the timid spirit heroically indifferent 
to self The true refuge of the artist 
is absorption in his art ; the true 
refuge of the self-conscious worker is 
complete surrender to the dignity 
and interest of his work. 



240 



Chapter XXV 

Consummation 

IF the conception of man's rela- 
tion to the world set forth in 
these chapters is sound, work is the 
chief instrumentality in the educa- 
tion of the human spirit ; for it in- 
volves both self-realisation and the 
adjustment of self to the order of life. 
Through effort a man brings to light 
all that is in him, and by effort he 
finds his place in the universal order. 
Work is his great spiritual opportun- 
ity, and the more completely he ex- 
presses himself through it the finer 
the product and the greater the 
worker. There is an essential unity 
between all kinds of work, as there is 

i6 241 



Work and Culture 

an essential continuity in the life of 
the race. The rudest implements of 
the earliest men and the divinest crea- 
tions of the greatest artists are parts 
of the unbroken effort of humanity 
to bring into clear consciousness all 
that is in it, and all that is involved 
in its relationship with the universe. 
The spiritual history of the race is 
written in the blurred and indistinct 
record of human energy and creative- 
ness, made by the hands of all races, 
in all times, in every kind of material. 
Work has emancipated, educated, 
developed, and interpreted the human 
spirit ; it has made man acquainted 
with himself; it has set him in har- 
mony with nature ; and it has created 
that permanent capital of force, self- 
control, character, moral power, and 
educational influence which we call 
civilisation. 

242 



Consummation 

Work has been, therefore, not only 
the supreme spiritual opportunity, 
but the highest spiritual privilege 
and one of the deepest sources of 
joy. It has been an expression not 
only of human energy but of the 
creativeness of the human spirit. By 
their works men have not only built 
homes for themselves in this vast 
universe, but they have co-operated 
with the divine creativeness in the 
control of force, the modification 
of conditions, the fertilisation of 
the earth, the fashioning of new 
forms. 

In his work man has found God, 
both by the revelation of what is in 
his own spirit and by the discovery 
of those forces and laws with which 
every created thing must be brought 
into harmony. The divine element 
in humanity has revealed itself in 
243 



Work and Culture 

that instinct for creativeness which is 
always striving for expression in the 
work of humanity ; that instinct 
which blindly pushes its way through 
rudimentary stages of effort to the 
possession of skill ; slowly transform- 
ing itself meanwhile into intelligence, 
and flowering at last in the Parthe- 
non, the Cathedral at Amiens, the 
Book of Job, Faust, Hamlet, the 
Divine Comedy, Beethoven's Fifth 
Symphony, Wagner's Parsifal, Rem- 
brandt's portraits. This ascent of 
the spirit of man out of the mysteri- 
ous depths of its own consciousness 
to these sublime heights of achieve- 
ment is the true history of the race ; 
the history which silently unfolds it- 
self through and behind events, and 
makes events comprehensible. In 
the sweat of his brow man has pro- 
tected and fed himself; but this has 
244 



Consummation 

been but the beginning of that continu- 
ous miracle which has not only turned 
deserts into gardens and water into 
wine, but has transformed the uncouth 
rock into images of immortal beauty, 
and the worker from the servant of 
natural conditions and forces into 
their master. Men still work, as 
their fathers did before them, for 
shelter and bread ; but the spiritual 
products of work have long since 
dwarfed its material returns. A man 
must still work or starve in any well- 
ordered society ; but the products of 
work to-day are ease, travel, society, 
art, — in a word, culture. In that free 
unfolding of all that is in man and 
that ripening of knowledge, taste, 
and character, which are summed up 
in culture, work finds its true inter- 
pretation. A man puts himself into 
his work in order that he may pass 
245 



Work and Culture 

through an apprenticeship of servi- 
tude and crudity into the freedom of 
creative power. He discovers, liber- 
ates, harmonises, and enriches him- 
self Through work he accomplishes 
his destiny ; for one of the great ends 
of his life is attained only when he 
makes himself skilful and creative, 
masters the secrets of his craft and 
pours his spiritual energy like a great 
tide into his work. The master 
worker learns that the secret of 
happiness is the opportunity and 
the ability to express nobly what- 
ever is deepest in his personality, 
and that supreme good fortune 
comes to him who can lose him- 
self in some generous and adequate 
task. 

The last word, however, is not 
task but opportunity ; for work, like 
all forms of education, prophesies 
246 



Consummation 

the larger uses of energy, experience, 
and power which are to come when 
training and discipline have accom- 
plished their ends and borne their 
fruit. 



247 



I 



p^^ £_ 



